


Kuu saa valtansa auringolta

by onnenlintu



Series: The Kasvatus Series [4]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: F/F, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-04 16:18:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 42
Words: 80,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14023989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnenlintu/pseuds/onnenlintu
Summary: Sequel to Kasvatus and Dispatches from Keuruu. Just like its predecessors, it's a fic about love - romantic, familial, and other forms. It's also still a tiny bit about sheep, as well as embalmed historical figures, Finnish folk music, condensed milk, backwoods sauna, and the occasional petrol bomb.





	1. Chapter 1

Lalli stood in the central radio room, feeling a little confused as to why he was here. Of course, a mage being called in here was a fairly frequent occurrence, but usually they relied on one of the handful that were in town full-time. The last time he'd been called on to purge the ghosts from a radio signal had been all the way back in Denmark, when Tuuri had been struggling to get in contact with Øresund base. He must have been quite out of practice, because the radio didn't sound unusually ghost-ridden to him at all.    
  
It was puzzling that he couldn't place the origin of the odd, staccato beeping patterns and occasional mysterious words uttered by the station it was tuned to. It sounded like no language he had ever heard, and something was strange about it even besides that. He was not the most seasoned radio operator, but he felt the world around him as any mage did, and could more or less tell how far behind the sunset a signal had come from. It was more reliable than trying to tell the difference between most of the languages that came through to Finland, in his opinion. This station, though, did not fit his schema. It bothered him.  
  
Virpi came in the door. This was another odd thing. She immediately made her way to him and smiled in a way he supposed was meant to be warm and friendly. "Lalli! You made it."  
  
"Mm." Lalli didn't know why she was bothering to note this. She should know, after all the special work he'd been given in the summer before the one just gone, that if he was given orders he carried them out.  
  
"I'm glad you arrived a little early. I want to know something, what do you make of this signal?"  
  
Lalli thought about it. "It's weird."  
  
"Besides that, Lalli."  
  
"It's not from Sweden. Or Norway. Or Iceland or Denmark or here. I don't like it."  
  
"Very good." This was another confusing reaction. He knew Virpi, as an administrator of all professions in Keuruu, was obliged to know what a mage could do. A mage knowing to look into the origin of a thing was very much what she should expect.  
  
Virpi continued. "But do you know where it is from?"  
  
Lalli thought some more. "No. It's weird. I can't tell how far west it is."  
  
Virpi looked a little excited to make her next pronouncement. "That's because it isn't from the west. The skalds tell me that the language is from east of the old Finnish border."  
  
That both made sense and didn't. "There's no people east of Finland. Everyone knows that."  
  
"Just try. I want to know how well you can feel this signal."  
  
The room fell silent as Lalli approached the radio and leaned in to the tiny speaker. He closed his eyes and could feel that Virpi was right. It felt weird because it was behind the sunrise, not the sunset. As his brain oriented itself around the new information, the sense of it spidered out through the mess of input like ice covering a pond, crystallising into a clear vision. He whispered into the radio, wheedling clarity out of it through the spiritual mess that stood between him and the signal's origin. When he straightened up again, everyone was looking at him. Virpi seemed expectant. "Got anything?"  
  
"South-east. Far. A lot of trolls somewhere in between."  
  
Virpi's excitement seemed to be growing. Lalli still didn't know why this was his job all of a sudden. "Could you tell exactly where?"  
  
"Not from here. I said it was far."  
  
"Could you follow it?"  
  
"Yes. I would know when I was near. But not precisely till I was close."  
  
He had hoped the distance involved would be the end of this discussion, but Virpi clapped her hands in glee. "That's exactly what I was hoping to hear. Alright, Lalli, we have some things to discuss. I have a very, very interesting opportunity for you."  
  
Lalli really wasn't convinced he wanted an "interesting opportunity". What he wanted - not that anyone was asking - was to use his allegedly free evening to go eat dinner with Emil, and to maybe take a small hunting detour on his next night scouting, and later in the week to go ask Onni if he'd fixed his coat yet. None of these things would be "interesting" in the way he was sure Virpi meant it, and that was absolutely ideal. He knew that the optional-sounding phrasing of "opportunity" was very far from the truth of Virpi's intentions here, and resigned himself once again to the fact that what you want and what you get are usually not the same thing.  
  
"Okay."  
  
*  
  
Lalli finally made it to the dinner he had planned, although by the time he arrived, Miri was piling washing up by the sink. "Emil, it's your turn. Remember to wash the outside of the pans as well this time."  
  
Spearing a cold dumpling with his knife, Lalli ate it off with little bites. He waited for a gap in the conversation. Jaana was showing Sini a note the Icelandic guy from last summer had apparently left in her cupboard for her to find weeks after he left. Sini was wrinkling her nose at its contents, but was still somehow having a great time reading and pointing out sections for the two of them to laugh at. Emil was alternating between scrubbing bowls and attempting to find space for them in the over-stuffed drying cupboard, singing the _hönni hönni, lätt att falla, aha hönni hönni_ of some cheery Swedish folk song to himself as he found more and more precarious niches for the crockery. Nobody paid much attention to Lalli at all as he finished his plate and began to just sit there, observing the people in the room interact. It was very much how he had intended on spending his evening. He was not happy with interrupting this, but the announcement would have to happen eventually.  
  
"Emil. I saw Virpi today."  
  
Emil turned around, wiping his hands on the front of his tunic and crossing his arms as he leaned back against the bench. "Oh?"  
  
"She has new orders for me."  
  
He looked so optimistic. It was kind of upsetting knowing how misguided that was. "Ooh, any more evenings off scouting?"  
  
"Not really." Lalli really wasn't sure how to say this. "I'm being sent back to the Silent World. A long way in."  
  
That was a conversation stopper. Everyone paused what they were doing. Jaana broke into their conversation. "Excuse me, what? You and who?"  
  
"Just me. There are weird radio signals coming from the east. I need to check who's making them. There might be people out there."  
  
"And how exactly are you going to communicate with anyone you find? You only speak Finnish." Jaana already seemed really quite annoyed by Virpi's plan, and Emil didn't look happy either.  
  
"She said that on the other side of the old line they often spoke like the people in Saimaa do. I understand that." Whatever he'd heard in the radio was certainly nothing Lalli recognised, but Virpi had seemed very sure there would be something like Finnish spoken out there. She had reached the peak of her excitement when she began to outline her glorious vision of extending Finnish resources to any villages Lalli found, getting animated enough for her own hints of an eastern accent to show as she envisioned the beautiful details.  
  
" _That's_ why she picked you? Just assuming that whoever you find is still speaking that kind of Karelian?"  
  
"No. It's because I've been to the Silent World before and can track a radio signal. But I think it's meant to help, maybe." Lalli didn't really appreciate the grilling. It wasn't like it was his plan.  
  
Emil piped up. "Lalli, if you're going alone, how are we going to know if something happens?" He had clearly also settled on disagreeing with Virpi's orders.  
  
Lalli just shrugged. "I don't know. I guess it's just like a really long scouting mission. You're just going to have to wait for me to get back." He could have predicted that Emil would make that face when he heard that. "I have an order."  
  
The look on Emil's face was starting to get incredibly upsetting. Jaana continued to pick at the question. "Did the radio signal sound Karelian?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Do you know how far east it's coming from?"  
  
"Far."  
  
She sighed and looked at Emil, addressing him. "I think this sounds like a bad idea."  
  
Emil was chewing his lip. "Lalli, I know you can survive out there. You're good at it. But this feels like a weird plan. I get why stealth is important, I remember what it's like out there, I just - all by yourself?"  
  
Lalli shrugged again. Weird or not, it was what he'd been told to do. "I have to leave in a week."


	2. Chapter 2

Emil swallowed his worry when Lalli was around. Lalli didn't need to hear it. It wouldn't help. It technically didn't help any of his housemates either when he went off on another ramble about what had happened the last time they'd gone deep into the Silent World, but they humoured him reliving the "dragged him back through miles of snow" story a third and fourth time. They were worried, too.   
  
"He's a scout. He'll be fine." Miri said, putting their entire supply of butter into the last dinner Lalli would be over for before he left. "Alone is what they do." Lalli had seemed slightly intimidated by the amount of mashed potato she'd shoved into his bowl that evening. He stared back with his usual quiet, wide-eyed manner as everyone made their comments on where he was about to go.   
  
Sini was trying for optimism. "If you do find any Karelian villages, you should ask to see some of them play music! The tunes from there are so much fun."  
  
"Oh. I'll try." Lalli was clearly neither here nor there about the prospect of meeting people on his mission. His approach to the whole thing seemed to be one of complete resignation.   
  
Emil didn't know how to deal with how easily Lalli was accepting this. Of course, for all the way the multi-purpose nature of everything in Finland made it seem otherwise sometimes, Keuruu was still a military base. Orders were orders. But somewhere in the knot of reactions he was trying to untangle, he found himself to be kind of angry at Virpi. She had a feel for the personality and capabilities of most of Keuruu, and she must have known who it was she was targeting with this dangerous plan.   
  
Yes, it made sense to pick out someone who had been to the Silent World before, but Lalli's boundaries were nonexistent the moment someone told him it was an important job. He had lost count of the amount of times Lalli had been worryingly surprised by Emil backing off on something that clearly made him unhappy. He wouldn't have said no even if it was far too dangerous. When he voiced this thought to Laura, she seemed to think he was being overprotective. "I mean, I agree it's a harsh mission. But he's a military mage and a good scout. He'll be back before the winter solstice, probably."  
  
It was true. Lalli was resourceful, clever, unerringly competent. He was doing his duty, because it never even occurred to Lalli not to do what others needed him to. Emil knew all these things about him. The latter was exactly the thing that made him pull Lalli into a tight hug before he got on the boat to Saimaa and beg him to be careful. Onni had brought a freshly repaired winter coat with him when he came to give his own farewells, but even through it Emil could feel the light press of Lalli's skinny ribs. Lalli was so much stronger than he looked, but still, Emil had to blink a lot and push down the part of him that was screaming at the idea of all this.   
  
"I'm always careful. You know, you can ask Onni if he's seen me. Sometimes we can meet in dreams."  
  
"If it's safe, we will communicate." Onni was still standing there, looking slightly awkward at the way Emil had followed his own brief shoulder pat goodbye with a solid minute of public emotions.   
  
Emil finally let Lalli go. "Okay. See you... sometime, I guess."  
  
Lalli moved Emil's hair back from where the hug had messed it up, nodded at Onni, and sprung lightly from the dock to the boat. Emil and Onni stood watching the boat leave, then departed from each other's company in silence.   
  
He lasted about two days before knocking on Onni's door and asking if he'd heard from Lalli. Onni took a while to come to the door and when he did he looked extremely tired. His eyes were red and puffy enough to look like he hadn't slept in days. "No, I've heard nothing. Maybe try again in a week." Emil was already going slightly out of his mind with worry, but with the state Onni was in, it seemed wise not to press him. He felt suddenly incredibly grateful for how much work he'd taken on over the past year. It was harder to worry about Lalli when he was at Merja's place and doing everything with Viivi permanently attached to his legs, or exhausted from a day of learning and working at Antti's. Over the next few weeks, he threw himself into every available task. Lalli being away was at least very productive, and the list of things he had to do became rapidly shorter. He consoled himself with the knowledge that when Lalli came back, he would definitely have the free time to appreciate the fact. 


	3. Chapter 3

Lalli had travelled for several days through the waterways of Finland, resenting the boat and his own body's reaction to it the whole way. When he reached the east side of Saimaa, he took the first opportunity to continue on foot rather than taking a ride to the mouth of the canal. The late October sky was impenetrably grey as he turned his back on the last humans he would see for some time, and the forest was quiet in the cold air. He didn't run as fast as he otherwise would, weighed down as he was by the pack he'd been given for the journey. In the dim light of the fast-fading sun, the bare bases of the pine trunks looked bleak against the light snow that had already fallen on the forest floor. He had been told that despite his journey probably leading him a little further south, the far eastern winter would be even colder than Finnish ones. It made sense. Emil had said something about it being colder here than in Sweden, and wondered how far east you could go before everything was permanently frozen. Lalli hoped that if he returned, he could give him an answer.  
  
He set up his tiny tent by the faint light cast by his spirit. There had been no time to hunt today, so he ate a little of the small food supply he was carrying before settling into a light, wary sleep. He woke before the sun rose and packed his things up in the dark, turning his face to the grey east and following the source of the light glowing in the treetops. As the sun started to gain enough power to be softening the impermanent autumn snow, he came across a sign. It was almost invisible in the growth of trees surrounding it, but he lifted one needle-laden branch and saw that the paint on it was still faintly readable, even after 90 years of rust and neglect.  
  
The red splotch in the upper centre of it might have been intended to look like a raised hand once, the text beside it was certainly an invocation to stop, and underneath there were words. Most seemed to be in languages Lalli couldn't understand, including some in a script that was unfamiliar, but he could just about make out that the first line was in Finnish. _Rajavyöhyke_. Border zone. He was entering the old lands of another people, and was further east than anyone had been known to go since the start of the world.  
  
It didn't look any different to Finland, and the gods he knew still sat in the earth and air in a way they hadn't in Sweden and Denmark. The pines and spruces grew just as they did in Saimaa, in Keuruu, everywhere Lalli might be said to feel at home. Here, too, the autumn colours of the odd stands of birches stood out like a lit match in the dark. He walked for days, his pace broken by camping and hunting to preserve his supplies, and found the forest to be nearly empty. His wandering path and regular climbs up any tall thing showed him that to the north-east and south-west there were huge bodies of water. The map he'd looked at before leaving had named them as a lake and as part of the sea that seperated Finland and Sweden.  
  
He knew that where the lake and the sea were close, the way between them would involve passing whatever remained of a massive city, _Pietari_ on Virpi's map. The city lay on the southeast path he knew he had to take, and she had told him that if such a city lay in the path of his signal-hunting, he was to investigate it. As he approached its limits, he found no sign with the name he'd been given, nor even many signs in a script he could read. Nonetheless, he was convinced this matched the map. He was far more familiar than he wanted to be with how the edge of an old-world city looked, and there was no other like this anywhere near here.  
  
Lalli could feel that this city was not the one. The signal did not have its origin here, still clearly being from somewhere far beyond. He pondered what exactly should be done. This city was certainly nothing but danger to him. He stuck to the shore of the huge lake as he passed it. Although he had been able to keep some distance, the forest had become noticeably thicker with trolls. "Pietari" had been truly huge, and the knots of disease that likely coated every surface of it still spilled into the surrounding countryside. Giants slept under the thinnest layers of moss, ready to be roused by an unwary step. Had there been more time, he might have tried to fish there with the single slender line he'd packed. He wondered if there would be a journey back in which he might stop for longer by a less dangerous section of the shore.  
  
As he left the city behind him, the countryside opened up again into the quiet of a place where few people had ever lived. He lost track of time as the days whiled on. Life became a simple blur of moving forward, waking to face the morning light, walking into it and being pulled further south every day. The bright spot in his mind, the glow of his target's origin, grew stronger. With every day travelled, the forest became colder. The sun was not as absent as it would have been at this time in Keuruu, so the forest around him seemed a little strange, but not so strange as to bother him very much. Somewhere along the road, his sense of the gods around him shifted. His were still with him, of course, and the forest spoke of them in many of the ways it always had. The gods still watched over their child, but it was only when he prayed that he felt their attention turn to him in the way it was always turned to those in the Finnish woods. Finally, he felt the slight emptiness of having left his homeland.


	4. Chapter 4

November was always an awful month, slushy and featureless and so, so dark. Emil had recently learned that the Finnish name of it was an archaic way to say "month of death", and found it to be horribly appropriate. It would have been depressing even without the worry that filled up his chest a little more every day. He had stopped knocking on Onni's door, after receiving a solemn promise that he'd be told if there was any real news. There were never any clear answers, besides that Lalli had not passed into the afterlife, which could mean he was in any kind of state besides death. Apparently it wasn't always easy to meet in dreams, and sometimes it was dangerous to walk through the sleeping worlds. He'd never thought about that, really, and wondered why he had failed to get Lalli to explain what exactly it was mages did in there. The list of things he wished he'd asked Lalli while he had him around all the time seemed so long now.  
  
Realistically, Lalli had only been gone about a month. Logically, he had no doubts that Lalli could survive for many more months out in a winter forest if need be. Realism and logic were not always the main frequency his brain worked on when it came to Lalli. At least he was living with four people who were increasingly ready to shoot over a well-placed "do something other than pining, Emil!" when he started to let it get to him.  
  
At the moment, he was doing the thing that distracted him best, which was spending time at Merja's house. He joined in with the general care of every child there, but always had special amounts of time for the two he'd picked up by the Keuruu docks over a year ago. The two of them slept on a mattress together in the kitchen, the house already being far overcrowded when they arrived. It was a situation that really illustrated how ill-suited for children Keuruu was, but at least they were close to the warm stove during the cold seasons. In the year since they'd started spending time together, Emil had been reading through the entirety of a book series that someone had given this house. It was a good use of time even besides what it did for these two, as it helped his own vocabulary as well. The books - if they could be called that, with their haphazardly presented loose pages and binding - were carefully written and contained a lot of words he'd never encounter in Antti's workshop.  
  
They had been copied down, probably from a book gone to dust over a generation ago, in a scrappy mix of adult and child handwriting. The love and minimal resources with which they'd been replicated spoke of an attitude to the stories that made his uncle's hatred of the same job seem almost churlish. It was obvious that they were relics of a far more innocent time, as the "trolls" or "elves" described and occasionally illustrated by round, friendly-looking drawings were nothing like any troll was in reality. The use of "elf" and "troll" was inconsistent enough to look like someone had made a half-hearted effort to replace one with the other at some point, and Emil had long given up trying to keep it clear, sticking to rephrasing sentences with the characters' names. He genuinely enjoyed the escapism of it, and couldn't help but project a little of Lalli onto his favourite character, an enigmatic, self-sufficient wanderer. His projection had only become more intense as, like the young "troll" in the books, he faced the prospect of waiting all winter for his favourite person's return.  
  
It had taken a long time to clear the others out of the kitchen that evening, and both children were already quite sleepy. Janne was always less invested in this than his sister, being far less dependent on Emil's attention in general. He'd warmed up somewhat to a few adults in the year since he arrived in Keuruu, but remained quieter than his little sister. Emil suspected that Viivi being a little younger when they'd lost their village made it easier for her, somehow. Whatever the cause, the way she had become stickily, gushingly attached to him made it impossible not to reciprocate her earnest love. Janne fell asleep as Emil was reaching the end of the book, but Viivi was somehow keeping her eyes open a crack, enthralled despite the late hour. When Emil finally reached the conclusion, she was slightly sad. "Emil, more."  
  
"There's one more book in the series. Next time we can start that one."  
  
Viivi was yawning. "I want more lighthouse story." She paused for a moment. " _Can I please have_ more lighthouse story."  
  
Emil hid his grin at her hopeful self-correction. Viivi knowing multiple ways to say the same thing was something that had changed since they'd met, and it kind of astounded him how fast she was learning to work out the difference between phrasings. "I don't know if there's a lighthouse in the next one. Maybe."  
  
"Maybe." She echoed his last word very sleepily.  
  
After he reassured her he would definitely be back in only a few days, she finally shut her eyes and seemingly fell deep asleep within a minute. Emil left with extremely careful steps, lifting the door in a precisely practiced way as he pulled it to avoid the creak he'd learned would otherwise come. He really hoped they would sleep until the morning. He had offered a few times to stay overnight here, but Merja had always told him that she wanted him to be alert for his other work. She remained grateful for his help, but never let him forget that his primary purpose in Keuruu should be dividing his time between the workshop and any Cleanser duties that might arise in the summers.  
  
Jaana was still awake when he arrived home. Emil found her sitting at the table, some late-night work in front of her but totally ignored. She was staring into space, clearly very preoccupied with something. He looked around the little corner at her as he took off his shoes. "You okay?"  
  
"Mm." She looked neither particularly happy nor particularly upset, but also very much as if something was on her mind. Her mood had become very strange as the autumn progressed. Emil remembered that she'd complained to him and everyone else that she'd been under a lot of stress lately, and given them plenty of detail about the chaos it was throwing her body into. Nobody here was particularly shy about starting a conversation with the announcement of some oddly timed bleeding or unfortunately located itch. He had learned in the year since he moved in that his response to any such talk should be to nod a lot and offer to get the ingredients for whatever home remedy one of their mothers swore or had sworn by. Emil was the opposite of an expert on these things, having both grown up with no sisters and missed some fairly crucial years of public school, so trying to analyse any of it seemed pretty much pointless.  
  
"Um, are you still feeling sick? You look worried."  
  
She looked towards him. "I suppose. It's fine." The neutral tone and vague response were so unlike her that he paused after putting his shoes away, leaning on the threshold. Her smile was slightly reassuring. "Honestly, it's fine."  
  
"Is there something you need to talk about?" Leaving people alone when they might be upset was not a thing Emil liked to do.  
  
"Mm, not now. I need to work out a couple of things."  
  
"Can I help?"  
  
"I said not now, Emil."  
  
Her answer was unsatisfying, but that was a very clear sign not to press any more. Emil went to the stovetop and spooned out a pile of leftovers, bolting them down as he realised suddenly how late he was eating dinner. He decided to let her be alone for a bit. Jaana was really not the kind of person who kept secrets for long, anyway. As he started to climb the stairs, she called after him. "Maybe in a few days we can have a house meeting. When everyone's free and we can discuss stuff properly."  
  
"Oh. Sure!" It sounded like there would be a conclusion soon. Emil continued to dwell on Jaana's weird mood, to the extent that he was almost drifting off to sleep before he thought of Lalli again. The fact he had no idea when he would next be woken up by Lalli coming in his window still made him incredibly sad, but he slept soundly, worn out by the many, many tasks of the day.


	5. Chapter 5

Lalli stood in the forest clearing, hands crossed against his chest and eyes to the sky. The clouds were parting in response to his incantation, and silver light flooded the space between the trees. The moon was full again, which told him that by most people's count, it would have been around a month since he left Finland. He himself had stopped numbering the days of walking, running, hunting and hiding. The pattern of the moon, however, did not differ even in a land this strange. Lalli could feel that he was close to the origin of the signal. He was deeply, deeply unhappy about this, because all the signs pointed to him approaching the edge of an absolutely enormous city.  
  
The countryside for miles around this place roiled with disease. He stepped with all the care a light-footed life had taught him, profoundly grateful for the fact that by now, the frost was very much settling in. The temperature spiked slightly into melting during the afternoons, but every night Lalli awoke to frozen puddles and the light crunch of ice on everything. It was cold in his tent, but the cold was good. He would need to enter this city at the centre of this miasma, and it being under a layer of frost was possibly the only reason he had any hope of leaving it alive. As the constant threat of trolls became keener with every step closer, the time since he'd slept with anything resembling peace stretched into days, but he'd known sleep deprivation before. He just needed to go in here, find where on earth this signal was coming from, then hopefully leave promptly. Perhaps he would be home not long after the winter solstice.  
  
Finally, as the sun stretched pale fingers out and made its wintery effort to haul itself over the horizon by them, infected woods began to be broken up by the tall twilit spectres of infected buildings. He had approached quite deliberately away from any major roads, avoiding the car-clogged entrances and exits, and was clearly off the area of map Virpi had shown him. No sign was required to tell him what he needed to know about the danger here, though. The trees were taking over what seemed to be formerly dominated by stone, with the buildings being not unlike a horrifying take on a pine wood themselves. They stood in rows, identical looming rectangles arranged around large squares and big, clear roads that the forest was well on its way to totally reclaiming. Every one of them was solid enough to be nesting trolls even in its cold peak, and trolls there were, in their hundreds and thousands. The sheer volume of them was shudder-inducing. Lalli walked through the brushy mid-road foliage, trying to keep half an eye on every building, distinguishing them by the patterns of tree that grew up them and the shape of the rot that stained their sides.  
  
He was not prone to terror and panic, at least on behalf of his own life, but the feel of a block to his left where he could tell one enormous giant filled nearly every corridor did make him think with intense longing about how grateful he would be to return to the woods. Frosty morning turned to chilly afternoon, and Lalli was still walking without having come to the centre of this city. He knew he was fast, even when employing the utmost stealth. This city must have been of a truly incomprehensible size.  
  
The sun was starting to set, and Lalli could finally feel that he had found the heart of this place. After hours of wandering deeper and deeper into the troll-infested hell, he had come across an open space that might have well been an old central square. Being out in the open was worth it for now, as he had a clear line of sight from the top of a blocky little building he'd scaled. It was non-ideal, being much shorter than the other buildings, but the huge one opposite him felt more ridden with trolls than anything he'd known before and he saw no good reason to risk approaching it. The little building he was squatting on top of was one of the strangest things Lalli had encountered in his life. He had thought about taking very brief shelter inside it for the night, but having entered, had found a glass case in which rested the most strange-looking corpse Lalli had ever seen. This was not really his area of expertise, but he was very sure they did not usually decompose like that.  
  
Lalli was not one to be hugely upset by a dead body, but the bizarre display somehow made him feel deeply uneasy. Yes, the building was solid and very unusually short on trolls. He had killed the few in there before they woke up enough to mount a real attack, flashing with magic and the speed of his knife. However, despite nothing being identifiably wrong, the bare design of the room and the warped appearance of its contents were profoundly unnerving. The ritual look of it convinced him that there might be some god at work here that he had no knowledge of. He had decided this place was better used as a perch than a hideout.  
  
At least the height of the buildings around him took some of the bitterness out of the wind. He observed the view around him, contemplating what his next step would be. The sky to the east was fast turning to dusk, and the strange building that lay at one end of the open square was falling into shadow as the light faded behind it. For the first time in a life focused more on the forest and the gods than any man-made thing, Lalli was struck by its beauty. The swirls on the top of its many towers were more like some kind of flower than any place humans might live. Colours still caught the evening light, even after years of neglect, in a way unlike any other building he'd ever seen. Somewhere buried deep beneath the grim resignation that was now compelling him forward, he thought that perhaps someone would be pleased to hear him describe it if he ever made it back to Keuruu.  
  
Snow began to fall again over the square. Lalli shivered. He had been still too long. This was not a mistake he could afford.  
  
Leaping down from the top of the weird tomb, he traversed the square. Under his feet, he could feel the hum of something huge. It had been there for some time, increasing in intensity as he delved further and further into the ruins. There were trolls there, more than Lalli could begin to process the sensation of. Some kind of cave network, perhaps. It would be dangerous beyond belief, but that was where he needed to go. Below the city was where many strange things still worked, so below was perhaps where he would reach his target.  
  
The grate was held open by a long-clean skeleton, thankfully turning to dust in a way that looked perfectly familiar. Lalli hauled at it and felt some metal come away in his hand. It rang out with a faint sound as bits of rust clattered to the floor. That would not do. He resigned himself to sliding his pack through the tiny gap, then his own body. Inside, there were many decorations that looked the same as the large red M he had seen on top of this building. By now he had seen many of these single-letter icons above sets of stairs leading down somewhere, and his hunch was that this would be the way into whatever lay below. After picking his way through a few open spaces littered with more knobble-boned skeletons, he found what he was looking for. Below him, the harsh-looking metal staircase descended into pitch black. He dropped his pack. It barely contained more than his tent at this point, and would only weigh him down where he absolutely could not afford it. Only his rifle stayed on his back.  
  
He did not appreciate the material of these stairs. It came far too close to ringing under his feet. He was relieved to discover that at the base, the ground once again became smooth rock. Lalli's eyes began to glow with a faint light which eventually grew to surround his body. By its barely-there flickering, he could just about make his way between the uncanny rustling of wakeful trolls to an area where a pair of tracks lay between two raised platforms. It stirred memories of a journey he'd taken some time ago, all the way back in Sweden. _Trains_. Under the ground. The old world had been a strange place.  
  
Dropping silently onto the tracks, he crouched down and dimmed his light. So far, he had gone undetected. From the feel of the walls around him, he knew he had little choice but to keep it that way. Lalli was far beyond the edge of the Known World, unnaturally deep below the earth, and utterly alone.  
  
He set off along the tunnel, senses open to everything but the endless whispering of the trolls.


	6. Chapter 6

Emil had been extremely busy for the last few days. A shipment of miscellaneous parts had come in from a surprisingly waterproof barn someone had raided in northern Finland, and the task of the week had been trying to find ways to make some of them work. It was incredibly satisfying when it went well, and tooth-grittingly frustrating when it didn't. A lot of old-world tech contained electrical parts that were a total mystery and degraded totally within years of it being abandoned, which made large sections of their shipment useless. However, there was the odd mechanical part which Antti could recognise as being from a few decades prior to the end of the old world, and for some reason this usually proved to be a good sign. He worked on them with Emil and his few other apprentices, teaching them to coax life and usefulness out of the rust. In Sweden, they would have just made a new version of whatever was needed here, but out here in the sticks sometimes a hundred-year-old part was the only option.  
  
Emil had been as impressed as ever with Antti's acuity. He had come to greatly admire the range of things his mentor was good at. The combination of being both very good with fire and casually adept in a specific practical history was one that couldn't have appealed to Emil more. As a teenager, he had never felt genuine appreciation for a teacher, taking his tutor totally for granted and resenting the ones at school. Antti shrugged off his comments about seemingly knowing everything. "Just keep working at the Cleansing in the summer and workshop in the winter, and you'll become good at all of it too. Keep your wits about you and you'll have at least as much time as I've had." His total conviction that there was nothing special or interesting about his success was bizarrely encouraging, in a way it would never have been to the younger Emil convinced of his natural gifts.  
  
Despite having worked all day already, he was feeling cheerful when he went to start the final story for the children Merja had started calling "your two". Emil had to admit he felt a certain apprehension when she let that phrase out casually, but processing what she was getting at there was a problem for his future self. Right now, he was going to get through a chapter of this book, then go home, then sleep.  
  
The book felt appropriate. Keuruu was in the final days of November, and that was also the month in the title. It was a surprising kick to Emil's mood when the first page was devoted to his favourite leaving. He had barely thought of Lalli all day, but this and thoughts of the bleakness of the season really brought home how long it had been since he heard even vague reassurances from Onni. He kept reading nonetheless, distracting himself trying to really act out the voice he'd devised for each character. Janne loved that part, and anything that made him respond was worth putting effort into. The mood of the book remained more melancholy than all the rest before it, though, and Emil was kind of glad to put it down and wish them both good night. After a half hour of dealing with both of them announcing in turn that they needed to pee before they slept, he got them to settle down and finally headed home.  
  
The kitchen was dark when he entered. Lighting a lamp, he saw a note on the table in Jaana's handwriting. _I've checked with everyone. You all have free time tomorrow evening. House meeting, please._ He was glad to hear there might be some conclusion to the worrying time she was having. A couple of the others had started behaving as if they knew something, and nobody had clarified to him exactly what was going on. Another reason to get a good night's sleep tonight, then. He flopped down on his lumpily stuffed mattress as though he was sinking into a perfect cloud of luxury.  
  
Emil's dreams were strange. First he was running through Mora, trying to find the ingredients for Miri's sworn-by anti-itching recipe, somehow unable to remember the names for any of it in Swedish. Next he was working his way through the forest outside Keuruu, setting fire to each tree individually with great determinism, then realising to his horror that he'd set fire to one of the special trees Lalli and Sanna filled with skulls. Finally, he was standing in the kitchen of his own house, or something like a mix of his house now and the house he'd grown up in, and Lalli was approaching him. He smiled and laced his fingers into Lalli's hair, drawing him into his arms, knowing how these dreams went.  
  
Lalli placed a finger on his incoming lips. "Not now."  
  
Emil was confused, which seemed wrong for a dream. Usually dreams felt like he knew exactly what he was doing, no matter how bizarre it was. Awareness that he was dreaming was itself very odd. Something had changed with Lalli's arrival. He slowly registered the fact that the hair in his hands was lightly matted with blood, and Lalli's eyes were very, very wide. All-too-real memories began to mesh with the soft-focus sleepy vista. With a sudden, horrifying sharpness, Emil realised that this was less a dream scenario and more like a nightmare.  
  
"Oh, no _,_ Lalli. No, no, _no_..." He pulled away a little in a panic, trying to see if Lalli had been damaged. Not that he was even sure he would be able to tell, with this kind of projection.  
  
"Shhh." Lalli was oddly calm, touching a finger to his lips again. "I came in here to rest a little."  
  
"Are you hurt?"  
  
"Mm. Probably. I'm very tired and I think I... tried too much." Lalli was always vague, but this was not quite his usual kind of vague. Emil hoped this was just a normal nightmare caused by weeks of worrying. In his heart, he knew it wasn't. He remembered the feeling of these dreams too viscerally. "Have you been thrown out of your body again?"  
  
"I think I left it somewhere safe for now."  
  
That wasn't anywhere near as reassuring as Lalli's tone made it sound. "Where are you? In the real world, I mean." It felt so strange to be able to just ask him after all these weeks of waiting, with an extra layer of surrealism as his brain jammed on the fact he felt he should be speaking Finnish, but in some way wasn't.  
  
"A city. Under the ground. There were trains there, I think, before."  
  
"Which city?"  
  
"Mm, you know, I'm not sure. It was to the southeast. Really, really big. Probably the biggest I've ever seen." His tone was slipping into one of factual, absent-minded reportage.  
  
"What are you doing there?"  
  
"I think I'm lost." Still that calm tone, despite the fact Emil had never known Lalli to get truly lost before in his life. This situation was even more worrying.   
  
"Can you get out?"  
  
"I don't know."  
  
The dream was starting to go dark at the edges, and Emil tried to fight it off. "Lalli, please tell me where you are."  
  
"I can't."  
  
Lalli's voice was still there in his ears as he jerked awake, heart pounding. "I'm sorry, Emil."  
  
"Lalli." The name came out in a whisper. He didn't know what else to say. The fact he was still hearing the voice was the final proof that this had not been entirely Emil's subconscious torturing him.  
  
"I need to find my way back. I think I've rested enough. It's not safe to leave it for long there."  
  
Emil almost called out to Lalli to stay with him just a moment more, but caught his words right before they left his mouth. Of course lingering in the dream world was incredibly dangerous, with nobody to watch him at his most helpless. He could only hope Lalli was strong enough to actually make it back before... the unthinkable happened. The image of him lying, skinny limbs askew, in some troll-infested cave was enough to make panic take control of his breathing, as firmly as one of Antti's workshop vices would hold a plank. He sat up a little and hugged himself, trying to hold back the utter, helpless terror of the pictures running through his mind. Lalli was in undeniable danger, utterly alone and an unknowable distance away, in the depths of some city likely full of things very ready to kill him. It seemed likely that the final trailing sentence he'd heard there were the last words Lalli would ever speak.  
  
_No_. He would not surrender to that possibility. Bloody-minded determination sparked within him. There must be something he could do to help. The frantic action of his brain now would be turned towards that goal, until he found undeniable proof that it had worked, or that... no. It _would_ work. He didn't know what it was he needed to make work in the first place, but he had an idea of who might. Clambering out of bed and shivering at the freezing night air, he hurried downstairs and pulled on his coat and boots. The night wind slammed the door behind him as he hurried out onto the street, but he didn't register the noise, already taking panting breaths of the fog as he headed across town at his fastest sprint.


	7. Chapter 7

Onni illuminated the air slightly with a wave of his hand, making just enough light to read the clock in his room with bleary eyes. A trite use of magic, suddenly seeming more justified as he learned he had been woken up at three in the gods-forsaken morning. Someone seemed to be trying to break down his door with their bare fists, making an antisocial racket that would likely wake up the whole street if he let it continue.  
  
"Onni! On _niii_!" There was no mistaking the weird Swedish emphasis Emil put on his name. He sighed deeply. It had been about a week since Emil had last come to ask if he knew where Lalli was, and at first he had thought the long break was a sign of him starting to cope better with the situation. Clearly, he had just been gearing up to crack even harder. Onni was of course sympathetic to other people who worried too much, and had endured his share of uncontrollably weepy days since Lalli had left. Emil's former visits had almost made him feel better, confirmation that he wasn't the only one to be a bit of a wreck over this, but now - it was _three in the fucking morning_.  
  
He lit the lamp that hung on the wall, yelling ahead of his approach that yes, yes, he was awake and the racket could stop. As he opened the door, Emil fell into him, clearly having been leaning on it to get more leverage in his frantic pounding. Onni stumbled back but caught himself despite the sleepiness, grabbing Emil by the shoulders. Pulling the younger man up, he stared him in the face, attempting one of the glares that despite being objectively toothless usually seemed to put the fear into him. "What the hell are you doing here at this hour?"  
  
Emil didn't even cringe at his tone. "Lalli's hurt."  
  
Onni blinked. "What?"  
  
"You know how, um. When Lalli and I went to the Silent World, and he stayed, um, in my dreams? When he couldn't find his body?" Onni had indeed been given some detail on Lalli's strange experience then, and found it deeply puzzling, especially given that Emil had about as much mage potential as a boiled radish. At the time, he had put it down to some bizarreness of the Silent Lands, but the fact Emil was mentioning it now...  
  
He realised what Emil must be getting at. " _No_."  
  
"Didn't he tell you? He spent quite a few days-"  
  
"He told me. Are you sure it wasn't just a normal dream? Absolutely sure?"  
  
The look on Emil's face was grim. Onni felt as though he'd been kicked in the stomach. "What's happening? Is he here with you now?"  
  
"He left as I was waking up but he says he's... lost, underneath a city, somewhere. A really big city... um. Ow."  
  
Onni realised his grip on Emil's shoulders had become violently tight. He let go. "Sorry."  
  
Emil rubbed at where his fingers had been a little. "It's okay. I'm worried too." He paused, taking a deep breath and blinking a lot, then wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. "Onni, I'm really scared. Please tell me there's something we can do. He's so far away." Emil's trust in him was totally incapacitating. The door was still open, so Onni went behind him and closed it, before moving back again to turn up the lamp enough for them to see well by. "I don't know." Even had it not been obscenely early, this would require some thought.  
  
"Can I help you know?"  
  
"Probably not." Emil looked like he was about to start crying properly. "Sit down. Tell me everything that you've seen."  
  
Emil sat down with him at the tiny table littered with work projects and related the entirety of his dream. It convinced Onni the situation was indeed mortally dangerous for Lalli, but shed no light on what he might personally do at all. The way Emil's eyes filled and shone despite his look of resolve was making it very difficult to keep projecting any kind of competence, as the urge to sympathetically join him was nearly overwhelming. The image of Lalli's helpless body came to mind with a wave of violent nausea and was quickly suppressed.  
  
"I don't think the whole of him can be retrieved through any kind of spirit channels. If his body has died, of course, I can" - Onni couldn't help his voice cracking - "make some effort to lead his soul on."  
  
"But he's not gone on. You'd feel that."  
  
"That doesn't mean he hasn't died." Onni's correction was as flat as it needed to be for him to keep it together.  
  
Emil looked heartbroken for a moment, then sat up again, taking a deep breath. "So I have to go find him in person. Is that what you're saying?" It was a conclusion somehow both bleak and full of the kind of optimism Onni couldn't at all sympathise with. Emil had no way of finding Lalli without directions, having none of the sense for the closeness of his spirit that Onni did. The connection of magic and family had been enough for Onni to send fire down to him and Tuuri even where they were in Denmark, once, and even now there was the vague sense of where Lalli's soul wandered.  
  
The knowledge that Emil was still totally determined to wander compassless through the east until he found Lalli made him feel put to shame. His lack of immunity grated at his being yet again. People like him were not made for any kind of heroics. Then again, that hadn't stopped Tuuri at least trying, even it it had been her doom. The memory of how he had waited safe in a city while the Silent World had taken the last loved one from him was still something that kept him up at night sometimes.  
  
He made a very abrupt and unwise decision.  
  
"You can't find him yourself. It's logistically impossible." Emil's gaze dropped. "But I can." A wide-eyed glance upwards.  
  
"Onni, you're not immune."  
  
"I've been made aware."  
  
Emil set his jaw, the look of conviction flickering back into life. "If you come, I'll do my best to protect you." It was on some level darkly amusing that he was immediately assuming he was coming too and assigning himself the role of bodyguard. He was easily shorter and smaller than Onni, incapable of magic, in general approximately as intimidating as a half-heartedly stuffed pillow. He was immune, though, and as much as Onni bizarrely tended to forget this about him, he had survived the Silent World before.  
  
"Going into an old-world city seems suicidal." He thought out loud.  
  
"Oh, in the winter it's not too bad, you know." Emil replied to his half-formed thought with more of that unbelievable optimism. "We even drove a car through a few without waking too much up, last time. I bet if we were really quiet, we might not even have to fight anything."  
  
Onni nodded. What a thought.  
  
"And it's not like a thick coat and a breath mask do nothing, I remember when Reynir got attacked once and if it doesn't break the skin..."  
  
The topic filled Onni with fear, but he swallowed it like the aftertaste of bile. It was deeply unreal that they were even considering this, but if he insisted on realism, the only other possibility was that Lalli would remain lost in this mystery hell until he died. Perhaps he had died already, and his soul was for some reason trapped, condemning him to an unknown age of horror. It wasn't something Onni could accept, even if the means of fixing it seemed essentially suicidal. The emotional reaction to that was neatly tucked under the rug as he realised they had a great many things to do.  
  
"Alright, Emil. By the clock, it's four. The next ship east leaves from the dock, if I recall, at nine."  
  
Emil shut up completely, listening and nodding.  
  
"We need to work out where on earth he is. I do have a guess. Immediately to the south-east of here, there was a large city, Pietari. I think in Swedish, perhaps, it had another name."  
  
"No idea."  
  
"We'll have a look. There's also the question of supplies."  
  
"Should we go to see Virpi as soon as her office opens?"  
  
Onni thought about this. He knew Virpi had sent Lalli partially because she felt she couldn't spare enough supplies for a real team. She was also familiar with the way scouts operated, knowing that the idea of sending a rescue mission for one was usually very misguided, and also having a history of scoffing at such personal quests. Although Onni was usually nothing but frustrated by anyone with an "easier to get forgiveness than permission" attitude, he'd had to take it himself last time when he had run off to Sweden to sit by Emil's family's radio. There were only so many mages, and out here nobody could afford to be upset with one permanently.  
  
"Actually, I think that's unwise. Think about what she's like."  
  
Emil made a small "mm-hmm" and looked thoughtful. "That reminds me. I could get a key to the skalds' office. There's maps in there." It seemed like the best use of time before any supply stores would be opened. Onni followed Emil across town as he made his way back to his own house. Once he was there, Emil dropped his voice to a whisper so as not to wake his sleeping friends, saying he might as well deal with a couple of things so they didn't need to return. Onni watched him find a key, put various items in a pile - the rabbit-fur ushanka he'd made for him, spare socks, a lamp - then scrawl something underneath the existing words of a note on the table.  
  
The lamp lit their way as they entered the office and started poring over maps in the dark. "Oh! In Swedish this is ' _St. Petersburg'_! I thought that had been sieged and destroyed by the Prussians long before the old world ended." Being reminded of the truly creative extent of Emil's historical misconceptions made Onni pause for a moment about his plan to go into the Silent World with him, but it seemed they were committed now. Emil was examining the scale on the map and again looking hopeful. "From Saimaa, this could be only a few days' travel. I really think you're right about it being this one, it looks huge. Maybe they did have trains under the ground there, old-world cities are full of that kind of thing."  
  
They took the map. Emil left another note apologising for having done so, leaving the key in the unlocked office. They now had only a couple of hours to get all their supplies together, but luckily, Antti was awake as early as ever despite the darkness of the morning. He greeted them as they entered his workshop. "Onni, good morning. Emil, have I misremembered your shift times?"  
  
He pursed his lips as the reason for their visit was explained to him. "You're right that I have a key to the big supply shed, but I do wonder if this is a wise idea. Are you sure it's necessary?"  
  
"I can't come to any other conclusion. Speaking as a mage."  
  
The older man replied with a tone of careful gentleness. "Onni, I do believe that you're right about him being in danger. However, the plan for this rescue mission seems extremely likely to kill you."  
  
"He's family, Antti. There's so few of us left." Having to be brutally honest about the meaning behind this flurry of logistics made Onni finally well up a little. Please, not now.  
  
Emil chipped in. "I've gone out there before. We had one non-immune person survive it."  
  
Antti looked deeply conflicted as he handed the key over. "I truly hope I won't regret this."  
  
The next couple of hours passed in a flurry of finding the right supplies and something to pack them in. Sections of a tent, a less delicate lamp, food, a breath mask, and various other supplies were divided between a pair of rucksacks. Onni's thickest cloak was retrieved from his room, the fur of the mage's hood being both warm and hopefully some insurance against attacks to the head.  The time before the boat was going to leave was looming close as they finally delivered the key back to Antti. Onni gestured at Emil to follow and turned towards the docks.  
  
"Wait, no! I have to say goodbye to Viivi and-"  
  
"Emil! The next boat isn't for three days. We have ten minutes." The boat might be late leaving fairly often, but the off-chance that it would be on time was not worth risking when it seemed that time was absolutely of the essence. Emil still looked very unhappy when he complied.  
  
Onni gained their passage on the boat with some very vaguely explained "mage business", grateful for the fact the skipper saw the silhouette of his dramatic cape and didn't even think to question his natural authority on the matter. As it pulled out of the dock, he finally sat down for the first time since the early morning. The fact he'd only slept for a few hours was starting to hit him, and his brain finally started to catch up with the plan he'd been putting into action all morning. Emil flopped down on the floor beside him, pulling his coat tight. It was dark as well as cold on the water, the ship's lamps providing little illumination and the sun still being just below the horizon. Onni's new travelling companion looked as blank and terrified as he himself felt. He guessed that they would be finding a few things in common in the coming week or so.


	8. Chapter 8

It made total sense that the weird way a lot of newcomers to Keuruu talked was some kind of accent. Emil didn't know how he'd failed to connect the dots between different people and their similarly hard-to-understand way of speaking. When they'd reached Saimaa and he'd commented that everyone there seemed to speak like a more exaggerated version of Onni, he'd gotten a look of confusion. "The Karelian dialect is what the majority of Finns use, you know. The speech of people who've lived in Keuruu too long is actually a very weird accent to most."  
  
"If it's the dialect of this area, why doesn't Lalli have it as well?"  
  
"He moved younger, I suppose." When Emil thought about Onni's explanation, he did realise that he had actually heard a touch of this lakeland emphasis in Lalli's voice before. He'd just been speaking to him the whole time he learned, and Lalli spoke in such an idiosyncratic way to begin with, so he'd never tried to categorise it.  
  
The waters of Lake Saimaa were quiet and dark under the early December sky. It was only a few weeks until the solstice, and the snow collecting on the shores looked like it was going to be there to stay. Ice formed in small patches, but the broad stretches of the lake remained liquid, lapping against the sides of the boat with a gentle motion. They hopped from island to island on their way across, following the inter-village trade routes, until finally they could catch a boat that took them to the mouth of the Saimaa canal.  
  
The ancient "road atlas" of Russia they'd pilfered from the skalds actually placed the point they alighted as already just within its territory. It wouldn't be far to St. Petersburg at all. With the pace and minimal breaks Emil intended to keep up, they would be there within three days. The journey over had already taken two days too many for Emil's comfort, but if Lalli had survived a month in there already, maybe five days of more acute danger would still allow them to find him alive. In the absence of further evidence, he was still refusing to entertain other possibilities.  
  
Onni had put his breath mask on before they even left the boat. He had been extremely quiet during their entire trip so far. Emil didn't know what to say to him, and his attempts to give Onni an opening to share his thoughts had been met with absolute stoniness. It had begun to snow again as they set off across the countryside. They found a former road within a few hours and decided to stick to it, as it was nearly empty and the broken-up tar still preserved somewhat of a clear path through the trees. Emil flipped down the furry panel that he usually kept buttoned over his forehead, shielding his eyes from the thickening flurries. "This is a good hat. Thanks."  
  
"Mm." Onni was deep within his hood and seemingly also his own thoughts.  
  
When the evening came, they encountered their first major issue. Not all of the tent parts they'd found were in good repair. As the blizzard continued around them, Emil despaired slightly of making this broken tarpaulin fit together in any kind of coherent way with the poles they'd brought. The hastiness of their preparation was already catching up on them.  
  
"Didn't we see a house about half a kilometer back?"  
  
Onni was dubious. "It could have trolls in it."  
  
"Did you feel any?"  
  
Onni admitted he hadn't noticed anything specifically dangerous. He was also not convinced that their shoddy tent would be much use against the elements that were coming down on them. The sun had already set hours ago, condemning them to make camp by lamplight even if they weren't delayed, so he agreed to a tentative look at the house. Packing up and tramping back through the snow, the two of them circled the building. Onni scrambled to hide behind Emil as a vermin beast emerged from a broken-down shed, looking heavily spooked even after it had been dispatched by repeated frantic stomps to the head. That seemed to genuinely be all that was living here, though. Perhaps whatever family had owned this place was already gone before the Rash hit.  
  
The front door took a little effort to break down, but the inside was worth it. Emil hadn't realised how cold he was until they had turned various moldy cloth items into a fire and started to hunker down. The uninspiring food they'd brought with them tasted amazing after a day of walking through the horrible weather.  
  
"I wonder if there's any tinned stuff here that we could still eat."  
  
"It's been ninety years. I don't think even the best old-world canning preserves food that long."  
  
Emil decided to search through the house anyway. It was totally possible there might be something useful in here. He took his lamp through a thin door leading out of the kitchen and found a section of the house that seemed to have been dedicated to the boxy-looking car sat within it. He cringed as he looked inside the vehicle and found his explanation for why none of this place's former inhabitants had become trollified. The rubber pipe running from the exhaust to the gap in the front window crumbled at his touch. He consoled himself with the knowledge that, if the insistent fire safety lectures he'd gotten as a new Cleanser had been correct, it was possible to die this way without ever noticing much.  
  
The comfort felt suddenly much less effective as he hauled one skeleton out of the way and realised there had been another, smaller skeleton curled up in its lap. Emil tried very hard not to think about it as he examined the inside of the car and found it in surprisingly good condition. Although the seats were stained with the long-dried fluids these bodies must have let off when they rotted, nothing seemed to actually be missing. Now that he thought about it, he might as well take a look at this and see how it worked. It wasn't quite yet time to sleep, and Onni wasn't likely to furnish him with any conversation.  
  
Dust puffed into his eyes as he lifted the bonnet. Again, nothing seemed to be missing here, although the lamp's dancing glow didn't give too complete a picture. In searching the shelves for something else that might give any light to see by, he noticed that this family seemed to have kept quite a lot of the things needed to repair and fuel their car. It occurred to him that this was certainly not the worst looking thing he'd seen dragged out of an old-world building. The strange unrepairable parts were surprisingly absent for something from the very end of the old world. Rust definitely left holes in the doors where bodies had slumped against them and leached fluid, but various essentials had... potential.  
  
The little icon on its bonnet reminded Emil of a longboat with fast, open sails. Perhaps that was some kind of good omen. A small and wildly optimistic idea started to crystallise in Emil's mind. Maybe it wouldn't take them three whole days to reach St. Petersburg. He broke open an ancient toolbox, hung his lamp on the corner of the hood, and started to fiddle with the engine.


	9. Chapter 9

Onni sat very uncomfortably when Emil left him alone to go explore the house, wracked with enough anxiety for even a light doze to be impossible. So far, the other man had kept his promise, acting as a guard to the best of his ability whenever something might be contaminated or contain a troll. Despite his clear dedication, depending so heavily on him was terrifying when his troll-killing methods still seemed to rely more on the strength of panic than any calculated skill. It really brought home yet again how poor their planning had been when Emil had needed to tug a plank off the shed to use as a weapon, even if it had been a good thought when he insisted on going into the house first and checking if there were any trolls the magic had missed. Onni had wondered if the kantele he had actually thought to pack would make as useful a blunt-force weapon against trolls as it did against the average human.  
  
Emil had been gone a long time, and there were some strange noises coming from the area of the kitchen he'd entered. He had better not be opening things that would give him food poisoning. Picking up the tiny supplementary lamp he'd been left with and following Emil around the corner, he found a door in the kitchen open and a faint light emerging from the room beyond.  
  
"Onni! Look!" The excited voice came to him through the interference of some weird whirring. When Onni entered the room, he was faced with the scene of Emil surrounded by boxes of tools and odd bottles, head deep in the open bonnet of a rusty car.  
  
"Is that car full of dead bodies?" It looked like an entire family had died in there.  
  
"Oh, uh, yeah. I was going to move them when I'm done."  
  
Onni wasn't very convinced that "done" would be any time soon. "Don't you think we should be getting some sleep before we have to walk all day tomorrow?"  
  
Emil didn't seem to register the tone of his question at all. "Check it out, this one has some kind of manual crank for the battery. _Awesome_." He was spinning something within the engine while pouring one of the liquids into a hole near the top of the whole mechanism. It made a staccato whirring that was fast becoming very annoying. " _Skit_. There's a hole rusted in this. Help me find something to patch it up."  
  
Onni supposed he might as well speed up the process of Emil ruling this out. They located a small puncture-fixing kit of some kind, which Emil claimed he didn't have much faith in once the engine warmed. Still, with several layers of patching the little tank he was trying to fill held liquid again. He returned to "turning it over", looking doggedly determined to keep doing so until something happened. Onni watched him try for a good half hour, with interludes of Emil tapping away at various pipes and declaring them surprisingly well preserved. "I guess they just left the engine running till it stopped when they... anyway, there wasn't much fuel sitting around in it, so that's good for us."  
  
He wouldn't be dissuaded from his task. Onni returned to the central room where they'd found the stove, breaking up a few more flammable items and tossing them in. The horrible whirring continued from the other room. Emil seemed so sure that this would get them to Lalli faster. Onni didn't know how to tell him that he wasn't sure speed was as important as he thought. Lalli had been clearly left defenseless in perhaps the worst danger the world could hold, and for the entire journey so far he had been emotionally preparing for their task to be different to the stated purpose. The amount of time he'd spent thinking about what magic might be holding Lalli in the land of the living, and what might be necessary to lead him on, made Emil's high expectations nothing but exhausting.  
  
After several hours in the house without incident, even Onni's ability to worry about being ambushed in the night was being worn out, and the whirring became regular enough to start to ignore. He drifted into a light, fitful sleep on the decaying couch, not even deep under enough to dream.  
  
He didn't know how long he dozed for, but his attempt to rest was halted when he heard a mechanical roar from the garage, followed by a whoop of triumph. The sound of joy was immediately followed up by some worryingly crunchy noises, coughing and _"satans djävla piss!"_. Onni staggered into the garage to find it full of black smoke, with Emil hauling at the bottom edge of the weird outer door. The crunching had mostly stopped, but the car was still running and belching foul black clouds from the exhaust. Onni ran to Emil's side and helped him lift the door, releasing the fumes into the outside air. The moon had risen since they entered the house, and although it was waning it was still big enough to cast light on the two of them as they stood in the entryway.  
  
"It works!" Emil said, slightly hysterical with glee. He could barely contain his excitement at his own feat of competence. Through the streaks of dark residue the last few hours had left on his face, the glint of his pale eyes looked wildly alive. Onni listened to the hum of the car inside and couldn't help but find his joy a little infectious.  
  
"The exhaust probably shouldn't look like that, and I still need to work out how to drive it, but this should cut two days off at least! Yes!"  
  
"Are you just now telling me you can't actually drive?"  
  
"I mean, how hard can it be?" Emil was still high on his own success.  
  
"I suppose it's not that hard. I've driven a tractor before." Usually it had been Tuuri's job, as with all mechanical things, but he had learned the basics at the same time she had. Keeping them in practise, however, would have required leaving the base after they'd arrived there. Still, he had to admit the hardest part seemed to be over.  
  
"I didn't know you could drive!"  
  
Onni made a noncommittal noise. "It was over a decade ago."  
  
"Do you know how to make it go backwards? Because that was what I was worried about."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Well, there's a lot of corners in cities. I figured I'd just have to avoid getting stuck?"  
  
This was starting to sound like a solid argument against Emil driving. Onni had minimal confidence in his ability behind the wheel, but he did have some clue about what to try to make it reverse. And the faster they got in and out of this terrifying place, the better. He sighed and agreed it might be best if he gave it a go.  
  
The two of them finally got a little sleep. The morning wasn't without incident, as Emil did have to put some effort in yet again to make the car start, but once it had they set to work depriving the back seat of skeletons and replacing them with supplies. Emil brought every flammable-seeming liquid that still had an even halfway solid container. "No, really! We might need all of it!"  
  
"Do they really use that much fuel?"  
  
"I don't know if it's much good after this long. It might run out faster?" Onni still thought the stash of fuel he'd found was a little excessive, and didn't know why he felt the need to also pack every other liquid that burned, but decided not to argue with it. It seemed to make Emil happier, and given they had a vehicle, they no longer needed to think so hard about these things.  
  
Having located where they were on the map, Onni drove the car out at a pace barely faster than walking. Emil watched his attempts to familiarise himself with the gearstick with great interest. After twenty minues of crawling down the road, the car stalled. "Onni, no offence, but driving slightly faster might be a good idea."  
  
The next time they got it running, Onni tried to take the advice. The speed finally picked up enough for Emil to need to pay attention to where they were on the map. "I guess we turn here."  
  
"Do we?"  
  
"That's what the map says for going to St. Petersburg."  
  
Onni felt the car idle under him. It was distracting him from the sense he was trying to tap into. "It doesn't seem right." He followed the map anyway, hoping that his sense of where Lalli was would correct itself soon. It seemed correct that as they made a direct line for the city, he should be feeling his cousin more closely, but the very vague sense of his south-easterliness was still all that remained.  
  
He was not used to travelling this fast, and it threw off every kind of wariness that was usually automatic. When the road behind him suddenly erupted, asphalt crumbs raining down through a fountain of spidery limbs and hissing speech, he did not expect it at all. He swerved so hard that Emil was thrown against the door, barely staying on the road as his foot slammed down hard on the accelerator.  
  
_"Saatanan vittu!"_  
  
_"Skit också!"_  
  
Onni briefly looked behind him and wished he hadn't. Emil was twisted around in his seat, staring in pure terror out the back window. _"Keep driving!"_  
  
_"Where!?"_  
  
"Uh, um." Emil was fumbling with his map. "We're uh, there's a turnoff, uh" - he was looking back again with a face whiter than paper - "maybe we shouldn't drive closer to the city with this making so much noise there's uh there's a road that goes sideways it's uh - _turn!_ Turn there!"  
  
The car skid, almost spinning as the back end followed its weight around. Onni caught a glimpse of the building-sized thing following them as they rounded the corner. Even here on the outskirts of the city, there must have been hundreds of trolls in one place to form a monster like that. They followed the long curve of the road that circled the city, the vast weight of the creature following them finally weighing it down enough for the car to leave it behind.


	10. Chapter 10

Emil tumbled out of the car, falling in a heap into the dirt. The two of them had kept driving long after the giant had stopped chasing them, circling around the edge of the city and finally stopping closer to the lake than the bulk of the houses. A few trolls had tried to leap out at them as they passed through a suburb at a slower speed, held back by Emil's fumbling with the map, but the car had reliably mowed them down or sloughed them off when Onni skid around another corner. Onni's hands didn't leave the steering wheel, nor did his fixed, wide-eyed stare shift much as Emil excused himself for a moment. Adrenalin had reached its plateau and he was feeling the effects of it starting to taper off.  
  
He walked a short distance away from the car and, with a surprising neatness, was abruptly sick behind a tree. Straightening up, he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and leaned against the bark for a moment. He took some well-earned deep breaths, letting his heartbeat settle. Well, that had certainly been an incident. He had almost forgotten what it was like out here.  
  
Returning to the car, he ducked his head in. "Onni? Are you okay?"  
  
Onni didn't move. "We're all going to die."  
  
Emil got back in and shut the door behind him. Despite his shakiness, he smiled, and it wasn't even entirely fake. "Honestly, I think that went pretty well."  
  
The look Onni gave him was clearly questioning both his sanity and how on earth he'd survived to adulthood. Emil tried to clarify. "Well, there's no damage to the car, and you didn't get anywhere near infection, and nothing seems to have followed us, so... nice work?" He was trying and failing to remember what Sigrun had said to him the first time they'd had to flee a massive troll. Whatever it had been, it probably wouldn't work on Onni anyway. Being in the position of having to give this talk was absolutely not something he was prepared for, especially not when it was somebody who he'd only ever known as the one to be giving him the lectures. Still, it wasn't nice to just let people stew in their emotions.  
  
He reached out a hand and awkwardly patted Onni on the shoulder. "This isn't going that badly. I'm impressed by the driving." That was definitely not the right move, as Onni just looked at his hand like it, too, had somehow grown a mouth and also started talking nonsense. Emil withdrew the attempt at a friendly touch. "Er, never mind. So it's still uh, should we... try to go in there on foot? If they're that ready to wake up when they hear a-"  
  
"He's not in there."  
  
"What?"  
  
"He's not in this city. We're on the north-east side of it now, and he's still to the south-east."  
  
Emil was bamboozled for a second. "I guess that could be good, right? We don't have to go in there any more."  
  
"You said he was in a city and unable to get out. Is that correct?"  
  
"Yes." Emil had been trying very hard to focus more on the consequences of his dream than on what had happened, but he hadn't forgotten a single second of it.  
  
"So unless he was wrong about being lost, which he will not have been, he is in a different city. We have the wrong place."  
  
Onni's tone was factual to the point of being ice cold. Emil felt the gut-twisting panic of thinking someone was angry at him. "I'm sorry-"  
  
"I was the one who thought he was here!" Onni had stopped gripping the steering wheel. His eyes, which usually shone at least a little during any display of emotion, were dry and fixed ahead of him.  
  
Emil took a deep breath. The blankness of Onni's anger was slightly terrifying, even if he realised it was only at himself. "We'll work it out." He wasn't sure if he believed it or was just trying to appease him when he pulled the crumbling road atlas out again and delicately leafed through the pages to find a wider view. Onni did at least follow the line of Emil's hand as he oriented a map and traced a line to what "biggest city Lalli had ever seen" might be south-east of here. "Oh."  
  
The obvious conclusion sat on the map like a crater, a huge blot with roads running out of it in every direction, looking for all the world as if the earth had cracked where the city struck it. The name of it was given in both Finnish and the strange script that seemed to be on every sign here. _Moskova. Москва́._ Onni was looking at the size of it with an unreadable expression. The two of them sat quietly for some time, the only sound to be heard the gentle idling of the car. "It's far." Emil finally said. "But I guess we can drive now."  
  
"If it breaks down for good, we'll be stranded quite far out." Onni was surprisingly matter-of-fact in his tone. He looked up at Emil. The distance in his manner worried Emil more than any shouting would have. Onni didn't follow up that statement with anything either positive or negative.  
  
Another long silence ensued. Emil felt deeply conflicted. Dragging Onni even further into the Silent World was incredibly dangerous for him. Despite his flippancy about the topic in front of Antti a few days prior, he did remember very clearly that the "one they'd brought back" had his equivalent in one not brought back. It was not a light decision for Onni to walk into this horror. It was also technically dangerous for Emil, but that thought was very, very obscured by the memory of Lalli's hair matted with blood in his fingers. It wasn't that this was the only compelling memory that was relevant, though. The fact he'd promised Viivi and Janne another chapter soon was still in his mind. The guilt he felt when he thought of that promise having become a lie was intense, but didn't stop him from replying as he did. "Well, I'd still try."  
  
"Of course we're going to try." Onni's tone of resignation was profoundly bleak. He sounded like he already mentally had one step out of the living world. "Get out the map."


	11. Chapter 11

Jaana hadn't known how to react when she'd come downstairs to find more writing underneath her note. The bizarrely nonchalant phrasing of _Can't make this sorry, gone to Russia with Onni, probably back next week_ first made her laugh, then dig the balls of her hands into her eye sockets with frustration. Those two were both ridiculous. The extreme likelihood of whatever they thought they were doing getting them killed was terrifying. Asking around Keuruu had confirmed that they had indeed left before dawn that morning, telling precisely nobody where they were going. The extremely important talk she'd had planned for that evening was derailed into one where everyone worried instead about Emil's antics, and she settled for rescheduling.   
  
She wasn't sure whether or not to be mad about the fact they'd taken a map. It was one of her favourites and an old one within the collection, but at least they'd had the foresight to bring something at all. Said foresight had been lacking in nearly everything else, as both of them had left many tasks undone before haring off into the wilderness, landing her as ever with more admin and sorting out of other people's lives. Running into Antti had finally led to confirming her assumption that it had been some kind of rescue mission for their mutual favourite scout. Jaana couldn't help but assume the mission was more or less unnecessary and that the two of them had worked each other up into this mess. While they were very different kinds of drama queen, in her opinion they both absolutely deserved the title, so it was completely plausible.   
  
Three days after Emil had left, she finally managed to get all of her remaining housemates around a table. In a way, it was better that Emil wasn't here for this conversation. She had thought long and hard about how to open this topic, and the only place to start that made sense to her was one that would only apply to the three present. Despite it being really an incredibly natural thing to ask, she procrastinated for a moment longer, accepting Miri's fussing and tea-making gratefully. Jaana was pretty sure Miri knew what this was about, having caught the suspicion in a few of her comments weeks before. She'd seemed very sympathetic to Jaana's quietness when her chat hadn't been possible the other day.   
  
Eventually, there was no more putting it off. "So, I wanted to ask you all something."  
  
Three faces looked back at her, waiting in total quiet for something to respond to.   
  
"So, you remember when we were younger, and we all swore that if one of us had a baby, we'd support each other and raise it together?"  
  
Sini let out a small "Oh!" and was shushed by Laura lightly touching her arm. Jaana continued on to her actual question.   
  
"I know we're all... kind of more grown up, now, but I was wondering how much the rest of you are still on the same page with that?" Of course, they'd all discussed the topic again in the time since they were earnest teenagers convinced of their lifelong bond, but usually while drunk. While they all had some sense of their best friends' plans and knew Jaana was among the ones who had always planned to have one sometime or other, it had been a while since they'd discussed this explicitly and sober.   
  
There was a small quiet moment while everyone waited to see if the others had something to say. Sini spoke first. "Of course we are." Her eyes were very wide and bright. "Or well, I am."   
  
"Yeah." Laura didn't seem to feel the need to elaborate.   
  
"Mm-hmm. Absolutely." Miri agreed in quick succession before following with a question. "Jaana, how long?"  
  
"I talked to a mage and they're pretty sure it happened near the end of September. It makes sense."  
  
"So, early summer."  
  
"Mm."   
  
Sini broke in, looking nervous. "So it was that Icelandic guy." Jaana nodded. "Are you going to tell him?"  
  
"Oh, what, so we can get a letter a day explaining about how _actually, in Iceland we raise kids like this?_ Nope." Sini seemed incredibly relieved by the confidence of Jaana's answer.   
  
Miri stood up abruptly. "You know what? We all think you're the best." She hugged her. Miri's hugs were unselfconscious and snug, always lasting at least as long as they needed to. The smell of her hair was familiar and comforting. "So you know what you want to do?"  
  
Jaana wasn't sure she had a plan for exactly how everything was going to work out - they'd have to move house sometime once it was older, and she didn't know if she believed Keuruu was really a place anyone should grow up, and arranging any free time around here was always an uphill struggle. There were still difficult questions. She'd certainly thought about getting rid of it, but in the considering, had realised that she had no idea what an actually good time for this would have looked like. It not being the absolute worst time for these things was sometimes all one could realistically hope for. Now that she was sure of her friends' support, it seemed like something that would probably be alright, somehow.   
  
"Mm. Yeah. Well, now that I know you're all on board." She couldn't hold back a smile as she said it, it really hitting her what a relief it was to hear it from them all. The love she felt for these three was something she almost took for granted sometimes.   
  
Sini was thinking. "Jaana, you won't be able to drink wine for _months_."  
  
"It is an absolutely tragic amount of lost time, that's true." Her long-suffering tone was met with laughter.   
  
"Hand it over to Emil the moment it's out and immediately get drunk enough to make up for it." That was Laura's suggestion, met with even more laughter.   
  
" _Excellent_ idea." Jaana continued in a more serious tone. "I guess it's pretty nice we have someone here who loves to babysit so much." She was choosing the side of optimism on the idea of him returning for now. The table went a little quiet as they remembered their earlier despair at his prospects, but Miri quickly steered the topic back to Jaana's important news, for which she was grateful. "Have you thought about what you're going to name it?"  
  
Jaana had one idea, but decided to keep it to herself. It was something she felt she should ask Onni about first anyway, if he ever came back. "I think I'll see what it's like first, maybe."  
  
"Mm. Good idea." 


	12. Chapter 12

The main road to Moscow was still littered with vehicles. Those that had been caught jammed together still rattled occasionally with the activity of their old drivers. Onni learned quickly that keeping to the back roads was much wiser. Emil sat with the map, mostly keeping his comments to observations about the next place to turn. He had held off on further awkward attempts at comfort, but still seemed to be in reasonably good spirits. It was apparent that he had still not reached the same conclusion as Onni regarding the purpose of their mission. His communication had retreated into more or less pure practicality, but still a kind of practicality that said he expected to be finding his boyfriend alive at the end of this. The sun began to set.  
  
"How far have we come now?" Onni had been following directions with little concept of where they were now on the map.  
  
"We're about a third of the way there. Not bad at all."  
  
"It's getting dark."  
  
"Honestly, we should probably keep going while the car is holding out. Does this have lights?"  
  
They found the headlights. One of them worked and illuminated the snow that was starting to fall again, thankfully lighter than the night before. They drove carefully through a small village, eyes and senses fixed on the outside of the car for signs of trolls. Nothing stirred, but Onni still felt his stomach lurch as he carefully navigated his way around an abandoned truck and his drop in speed again stalled the car. He pumped his foot on the accelerator, swearing quietly but enthusiastically.  
  
"You know, we might need to refuel soon anyway. While we're stopped already..." Emil seemed to want to get out of the car.  
  
"We're in a village!" Onni hissed barely above a whisper.  
  
"Just- look, I'm sorry, just wait there, I'll be really quiet-"  
  
Onni sat while Emil exited the car, shutting the door so quietly it failed to even totally shut. Onni reached over and pulled it in, wincing at even the slight click it made. Emil was in the middle of pulling things out of the back seat and opening the little cap to refuel when he caught sight of something on the other side of the car. He was staring at it with great interest, and Onni followed his gaze to the front of a store. The writing on the chipped sign was nothing Onni could read, but by the look of what remained of the shelves in the window, it appeared to be full of bottles.  
  
"A liquor store." Emil definitely had some worrying intention in mind when he named it. He ducked down again and finished putting more fuel in the car. "Onni, can you see if we can get this going again?" A less worrying question. Maybe he had decided against whatever strange idea he'd had.  
  
The car did start again, idling with as few weird noises as it ever did. Emil shoved the nearly-empty first canister into the back seat again. "Hey, wait here."  
  
"Emil, what are you-" Onni didn't dare raise his voice enough for it to keep reaching him as he circled the car, approached the front of the liquor store and jiggled the door. It was shut. Emil looked around with some awkwardness and called in a stage whisper back to Onni. His figure was barely a silhouette in the dim illumination given by their headlight.  
  
"Are there a lot of trolls around here?"  
  
Onni couldn't believe this. He called back, hating how the muffling of his breath mask made him speak louder. "Some! Not in there but close!" They weren't sufficiently near for him to give any more detail than "in this village", but for him that was more than close enough.  
  
Emil only seemed to hear "not in there", as he picked up the remains of a board sign that sat on the street, hefted it and smashed the glass of the window. The sound rang out in the otherwise silent night. Onni watched in terror as Emil climbed through the window, disappearing into the darkness within. Within a minute, he emerged with a dozen bottles precariously balanced in his arms. Onni didn't need to be told to drive once Emil had shoved them into the back and climbed rapidly back into his own seat.  
  
"What the hell was that?" He'd waited to talk until they cleared the village. They were well on the road out but Onni still felt sticky with the sweat of fear.  
  
"Weapons." Emil seemed unusually confident.  
  
"Didn't you see the size of that giant before? Smashing a bottle on the side of it is going to do exactly nothing!"  
  
"I did see the size of it. That's why." Onni didn't see the sense in what he was saying at all. "Trust me. I'll show you when we stop for the night." Trusting Emil's opinion didn't seem like the best move after he'd just gone and risked waking up a village's worth of trolls, but Onni kept driving in silence. Long conversation was a little beyond him, much less any kind of conflict.  
  
Emil wouldn't understand at all. He didn't even realise this mission was essentially for Lalli's soul rather than his whole self, so expecting him to understand the set of feelings weighing Onni down - the grim horror of accepting that this was likely just a countdown to him getting infected and abandoned on the journey home, even if there was one - was absolutely unrealistic. The burden of being the only realistic one in the situation seemed somehow almost as heavy as his own impending doom. He supposed this was what he could have expected. Complaining about it would accomplish nothing.  
  
The tent held up a little better against the lighter snow. At least it was just far enough below zero that the damp would be less bad. Pitching it next to the car kept off the worst of the wind. Once they were set up, Emil stood with purpose. "Alright. Here we go."  
  
He set up a lamp on top of the car. Its light fell on the surrounding area, illuminating the bonnet brightly enough that Onni could see perfectly when he sat on it and started to rip up one of the piles of rags they'd brought along for more insulation. "Hey, can you get me some of the small tins of flammable stuff? I think that'll work for this." Onni obliged, bringing him several of the useless-seeming little containers. Emil poured some of it on a scrap of rag and flicked the firelighter he always kept on him. The look of glee on his face as it roared into flame was almost as bright as the fire itself. He dropped it in a patch of snow and watched it die, gesturing Onni over. "Okay. Let's soak all of these."  
  
The two of them worked together to find something that would hold all of the rags as they absorbed as much of the fluid as possible. "Great. Now let's empty out these bottles." The little row of them glinted in the lamplight where they were left on the bonnet. Even given the dire of the situation, it seemed like a shame to pour out all that vodka, but Onni had finally worked out what Emil was getting at. "Molotov cocktails."  
  
"Yep. Best thing for the situation."  
  
"I'm not sure I see why." While Onni had never thrown one himself, he had the general idea that they were more for the purpose of random destruction than effective self-defense.  
  
Emil's expression lit up far more than was appropriate as he explained, leaning on the bonnet and beginning to carefully pour from one of the emptier canisters into a bottle. "They're for slowing down things much bigger than you. Make the stuff inside thick enough - this car fuel seems like it'll work okay - and the fire sticks to whatever you throw them at." He thought for a second. "I still haven't actually used one to fend off a giant specifically, but that one before was about the size of a house, and they definitely work on houses. Uh. I guess that doesn't quite follow, but I mean - I don't think anything could keep chasing you fast once it was cooking like that."  
  
This did actually make sense. Onni picked one of the smaller containers full of fuel out of the car. He supposed Emil had in fact been right about arbitrarily large amounts of flammable material being useful. He took a place sitting on the bonnet and started to fill bottles as well.  
  
"Oh, uh, you want to leave that about a third empty."  
  
"There's another ingredient?"  
  
"Well ideally, yeah, but we don't have any tar - anyway, it should be about that empty even with all the ingredients, it breaks easier that way."  
  
Onni poured a little of it back, grateful anew for his breath mask. This was not a pleasant-smelling task. "What if they don't break?" The glass seemed quite solid.  
  
Emil shrugged. "They usually do. Hey, look." He was demonstrating a slow-motion version of an overhand throwing motion, pointing at the way his hand gripped the heavy end. "Hold them like this as they go and they'll fly better."  
  
For once, he seemed to know what he was talking about. Onni wouldn't have thought to improvise weapons in anything like the same way, nor had he thought on any kind of tactics for actually facing down a giant. Despite everything, he felt a small spark of appreciation for Emil's skills as he watched him stuff the soaked rags into the mouths of the bottles, wrapping scraps around the opening to further seal it all in with a well-practised efficiency. Emil was actually very good at this, and extremely pleased with their output. "Could have done with more, but I guess we don't actually want to have to use them. If there's a next time, though, we're ready. Thanks, Onni." The bottles ended up fixed into one back seat by a decaying strap, and the two of them hunkered down in their tent.  
  
Once the activity and shreds of optimism inherent to improvising weapons had passed, Onni returned to his prior bleak mood. The heat of Emil's body under the pile of coats and blankets they were sharing made the night much less cold, but no less terrifying. Onni hadn't taken his mask off, even to sleep, and was keenly aware that all sorts of things might wander even though a night that left frost on every surface. Maintaining this level of anxiety was deeply exhausting, and eventually even the fear of being helpless in the Silent World couldn't keep winning against the profound tiredness of last night's poor sleep. The steady rhythm of a person's breathing next to him and the warmth of another body was almost something like comfort as he drifted off. 


	13. Chapter 13

Emil was surprised at how well the car was holding up. They did lose most of the next day's light to engine trouble, but by the end of the second day they were still almost all of the way to Moscow. It was a mixed blessing. Of course, they needed to be there as soon as possible to have any chance of finding Lalli alive, but with every hour spent driving closer to the city, Onni looked more and more like he was preparing for death.  
  
"We can't camp here. Too many trolls."  
  
They drove onwards, looking for a safer spot, and found nothing. Onni looked haggard.  
  
"You know, I can stay awake and keep watch." Onni just shook his head at Emil's suggestion. "I'll sleep in the car tomorrow. Really, it's okay."  
  
"We need the map."  
  
"Haven't we started seeing signs all the time?"  
  
Onni had to admit he was right. He still didn't accept Emil's insisting he could stand guard while he got some sleep. "How will you even defend yourself?"  
  
"We have a lot of heavy things now, and I have a knife." Admittedly, one man holding a plank or a section of pipe wasn't the most reassuring defense, and a troll getting close enough for a knife was far from what they wanted. "I'll wake you up if we need to drive away. I promise."  
  
Onni looked deeply pained at the idea of even admitting that barely sleeping and then driving all day was getting to him. After some argument about whether they would even get the rest of the way to Moscow with a half-asleep driver behind the wheel, he eventually let Emil haul everything off the back seat of the car, rearranging it on the floor and front seats. It seemed slightly more secure than the tent, and there was room for one on the back seat. Emil sat cross-legged on the top of the car, plank hefted in his hand, coat collar up against the cold and lamp turned right down to preserve fuel. He could tell that Onni wasn't sleeping, so climbed down and circled the car a few times, partly to warm up his limbs and partly to reassure the other man he was still out here.  
  
It must have been in the early hours of the morning when the shivering became so uncontrollable he actually had to move. Slowly, he eased himself to the ground yet again, trying not to make a noise. Onni's quiet snoring had finally reached an even pace and he wanted to give him as long as possible. He walked around the car a few times, trying to warm up, then spent a lot of time looking very thoroughly underneath it. Now that Onni was totally dead to the world, he was taking no chances at all. Some time before the dawn, the spookiness of being alone out here started to get to him. He could see the very beginnings of the sunrise, the trees standing out just barely against the horizon. Sleep deprivation was starting to fuzz his vision a little as he watched the light slowly creep out.  
  
"Emil." Onni was awake and opening the car door. Even in the dim lamplight, he looked somewhat brighter around the eyes. They decided to set off before the sun had even risen, shoving down the last of their supply of bread and closing the little remaining distance between them and the city. Emil passed out the moment the car started moving and awoke to the sound of Onni tuning his kantele.  
  
"What time is it?"  
  
"I'm not sure. Mid morning. You only slept for a few hours." Emil felt wide awake anyway. He watched Onni insert the little key needed to turn the pegs five times in succession, adjusting them with minute motions until they rang out in a scale that had started to seem very familiar after the amount of time Emil had spent around Finnish mages.  
  
"Are we in Moscow?" There were certainly some tall buildings visible through distant gaps in the trees.  
  
Onni paused his task. "As close in as I think we can go like this. I want to buy us some time."  
  
Emil just watched. He had no input to give on what looked extremely likely to be magic. Onni opened the car door and stepped outside, placing the kantele down. It was a strange image when Emil followed him and saw him begin to play, his ancient instrument still sitting on the rusty bonnet. He had seen magic many times now, of course. He had even more or less assisted in the magic that was woven into daily life in Finland, a few times. After some afternoons helping Laura carry things into the forest, he now understood the meaning of dissecting something and placing its skull in a tree. This was not quite like everyday magic.  
  
Onni finished his round of the tune he had been playing, a lilting, quick-fingered melody that always somehow seemed to be drifting down the scale. He raised his hands and Emil felt a shiver run through him as the chanting began. This was not a form of Finnish that he had a clear grasp on. Normal speech was almost always understandable to him these days, but once the ever-falling, ever-evenly 8-part lines of a mage's song began, he was usually very lost. Even other Finns who hadn't had to learn to do it struggled with the strange vocabulary the mage used for their art.  
  
Emil caught just about enough of it to tell that Onni was calling down some force of great magnitude, and that it merited many different words for cold. His statement about buying time made sense now. While it was still cold enough already for the trolls to be asleep, a patch of true winter arriving early certainly wouldn't hurt. Onni's hands had reached above his head and his face had become twisted as the hair stood up off his head. Emil's instinct to try to stop whatever was making him keen like that was barely held back by a well-instilled terror of interfering with supernatural forces. He watched in fear and awe as the air crackled with power even he could feel.  
  
Through the trees, the wind began to moan with a voice that, while light, was certainly not present before. Emil felt it touch his cheeks and start to send them numb. Onni brought his hands down on the bonnet, collapsing his weight onto his arms and breathing heavily. For a moment, Emil thought he was going to pass out, but he held steady, eyes fixed ahead. A few minutes passed, and it seemed the spell was over.  
  
"Onni?"  
  
He looked up. "Hmpf."  
  
"Are you okay?"  
  
"Mm. Give me a moment."  
  
The two of them waited, the sky above becoming noticeably darker as time progressed. Onni finally began to breathe normally and stood up straight, looking dazed but functional. He addressed Emil. "We should move. Lalli is in there somewhere. I feel it very surely this time."  
  
They packed up what they could carry. Onni took his kantele within him, strapping it to his back. Emil supposed, given what he'd seen just now, it might well be the best weapon he had. The two of them tied as many bottle bombs to their belts as they could, trying to space them so they clinked together as little as possible. It began to snow, the kind of tiny flakes that came from truly freezing clouds.  
  
"I guess this is how cold Russian hell is."  
  
Onni furrowed his brow. "What do you mean?"  
  
"Well I've always been confused by that Finnish idiom, you know, 'colder than the Russians' hell', it kind of makes you wonder how cold exactly Russian hell is, but..." Emil trailed off, guessing his thought was clear by now.  
  
Onni seemed like he might be slightly amused. "I've always taken it to be a nonsense saying. But I suppose if it refers to anything, yes, this might be it."  
  
With fire on their hips and ice on their backs, they walked into hell together.


	14. Chapter 14

The buildings around them were so tall, and so thickly infested. Onni had passed the point of even knowing how to process the level of fear he was walking through. It left him oddly calm as he trod powdery boot-tread prints into the thick layer of snow that was still swirling down. Emil was shivering a little. His coat wasn't quite as warm as Onni's fur cloak. Maybe he could take the cloak on the way home, in the likely event of Onni not needing it any more. His breath mask was firmly on, but feeling the festering masses that slept fitfully in every building made it seem that it would do minimal good. He didn't know how he could possibly leave this city without getting infected.  
  
The wooziness of having called down the storm did start to wear off as they got into the late afternoon and had to take out their lamp. Onni was grateful for the night of heavy sleep he'd been allowed. Emil had been completely right about him needing it. The skin-numbing cold and their steps being muffled by snow were doing them some good, as nothing had yet stirred as they made their way through the city, staying as close to the middle of the road as possible.  
  
Onni felt a movement. A beast. He grabbed Emil by the arm and pointed him at it, too afraid of waking up more danger to say anything. This creature looked like it had been some kind of dog, and approached at first with an unsteady, looping manner that almost looked disinterested. Emil handed Onni the lamp, hefted his plank while eyeing the beast, then approached it at a springy jog, swinging at its head. It leapt back, limbs blossoming open into three more beetle-like appendages each, and opened its over-toothy mouth.  
  
It made little noise besides a continuing low whimper, which if it had been a moment to count blessings definitely would have classed as one. Onni started to take shaky steps backwards as it sprang towards Emil, wondering if he would have to flee the scene to have any chance of surviving long enough to find Lalli. At the last moment, Emil managed to reorient his plank and shove the sharper end into the beast's gaping mouth, impaling it on the force of its own leap and making its limbs twitch a few more horrifying times before they went still.  
  
Emil hauled the plank out of the beast's skull and turned back to Onni, who was stood there, legs as tense as a hunting cat's. He gave Onni a small thumbs up and a nervous smile. The two gazes met, and both of them knew the other was terrified. Still without a word, they continued onwards, following Onni's quiet cues as he slowly tracked his sense of Lalli deeper into the city. The evening turned into deep night, and the snow still fell, the clouds that produced it blocking out the moon. With the stars and moon invisible, it was impossible to tell how far into the night they had walked, but it must have been many hours. Onni relied on only his inner sense of the trolls' whispering to keep track of where they were. The lamp couldn't hold out much longer.  
  
Finally, he felt sure Lalli was very near. He gestured Emil closer and spoke in a whisper. "Somehow he's below here."  
  
"I've seen a few places that are stairs going down."  
  
"That's what I'm worried about. I fear there is a very large open space below us."  
  
Emil took a moment to process exactly what he was getting at. "So just as much space as the streets, but sheltered? Oh, _shit_."  
  
Onni nodded. Emil lifted the lamp higher, and among the edges of buildings that gleamed frostily in the weak light, on the other side of the street they could make out yet another one of those weird sets of staircases. It was adorned with one of the red M signs you couldn't miss. They definitely signified a system of some kind.  
  
Emil took a deep, shuddering breath. "I cannot even imagine how many trolls are going to be in there." He paused. "That's what he said, though. Under the ground." Another pause. "Why the _hell_ would he go down there?"  
  
"They might still be asleep. It's probably pretty cold even under shelter." Onni was surprised to find himself the voice of some attempted optimism, if it could be called that when you were totally resigned to dying before you got home.  
  
"How would he even be surviving down there?" Emil was still fixated on the time Lalli must be having. Onni sighed and tried his best to put on a gentle tone. It was hard, given that he was trying to maintain a whisper while the content of the sentence made his throat hurt with suppressed feeling. "We might have to accept he hasn't." Emil had worked out a way to get them here fast, done his absolute best to arm them, and also watched Onni all night just so he could sleep better. He deserved the effort of someone at least trying to emotionally prepare him for what was coming. All Onni had to offer was this hoarse, abrupt attempt.  
  
"No." Emil was placing the lamp down, rearranging the bottles on his belt and putting his firelighter in an easier-to-reach place. He handed Onni the lamp and took his plank in a two-handed grip. "Not yet. Please." He was also choking down a sob they absolutely didn't have time for, and addressed Onni again. "Are we going in?"  
  
Onni nodded. "Of course." They'd come this far, after all. There wasn't really another option.  
  
Nothing immediately attacked as they slowly descended the concrete steps. It was still freezing as they trod softly through a wide corridor. The absolute bitterness of the wind began to be cut off as Onni made the choice of which path to take and the corridor narrowed. It seemed impossible that it could be even darker here than it had been in the cloudy night above, but it was. Onni barely resisted yelling as a small vermin beast threw itself at his leg. He dropped the lamp and it clattered as it spilled fuel. The lamp dying on the floor gave just enough light for him to aim and stomp on the spidery rat-sized thing by his feet. He managed to catch its head and felt it die. Once the ringing of the lamp's fall had stopped, all he could hear was Emil's irregular breathing.  
  
With a wave of his hand, Onni used a little energy to light the space around him. By the bluish glow, he could see Emil's jaw drop. "You've been able to do that the whole time?" He spoke in an incredulous whisper.  
  
"It takes some energy."  
  
"Oh." Emil went back to his tense stance, plank still held up as a guard.  
  
Somewhere in the distance, Onni could feel something stir, likely alerted by the horrible noise the lamp had made on the stone floor. He winced as words bubbled into his mind, repetitive and droning.  
  
_Помоги мне... спаси меня..._  
  
It was no language Onni knew, but the anguished cries for help were common to every Rash-made creature he'd ever known. They were almost enough to make the stone around him tremble, but just as suddenly as they appeared, they died again. Emil was looking around him and visibly shivering, not daring to speak enough to ask Onni what it was they were both hearing. Onni just gestured for Emil to follow. Lalli's soul was so nearby, somewhere here. After days and days of following the faintest signal, the trace of it felt strong enough to almost seem alive.  
  
The two of them came to the edge of a platform and dropped down to the tracks. Onni felt very strongly that this way was right. The fear began to break through again, finding cracks in the seemingly impenetrable wall of calm resignation. Even if he was already sure he was going to die, the prospect of how painful and horrifying it might be here was making his stomach churn and his clear thoughts fade into an amorphous hum. There was only the fact that Lalli was surely near, and his kantele was on his back, and every thought he could produce about the magic needed to save his soul from this place was close to mind.  
  
The tunnel with the tracks opened up into another wider area. Onni led the way up onto another platform. Emil was still following, mute and straining his eyes through the gloom. Lalli's closeness was vacillating. Maybe they'd have to go further.  
  
They would not get the chance to go further, because Onni's foot landed on a thick tendril. The ooze on it stuck to him as he pulled back, stretching and snapping with a tiny pop. The entire room around them began to shift and whisper with more cries for help, building slowly but surely into a scream as Onni took rapid steps backwards, eyes widening.  
  
_"спаси нас!"_ Even in the dim light, Onni could see a huge head whipping upwards as it roared.  
  
From behind him, he heard a lighter flick, and the room was illuminated as the bottle struck the sides of the giant. It recoiled all its tendrils, flipping Onni as he fell. He landed on his side and scrambled back behind the ridge of the platform. Huge arches in colours that still shone brightly through the slime were lit up as Emil lit and threw another one of his cocktails, causing the giant to keen and thrash, clawing at the fire sticking to most of its volume. He felt Emil grab him and start to pull him back down the tunnel they'd arrived through, then recoil. More fibrous, oily tendrils were starting to come from that direction. Another bomb, another follow-up bomb, more fire and roiling creatures. Onni looked back beyond the giant they'd begun to incapacitate. "There's a room past it!" They were a bit beyond keeping quiet now.  
  
They scrambled back up. The giant's flesh was bubbling and still illuminating everything. The stink of fuel and flesh was overwhelming as they tried to duck past it. Onni pulled the kantele off his back, slipping his wrist through the leather strap and gripping it by the thin end, and used it to club one tentacle that came near him. The giant was coiling into itself like a dead spider as it cooked in its own skin. They made it into the room behind, a wider space, and turned back to see that yet another creature almost as large as the first was slithering out of the train tunnel. It roared as the fire touched it, but didn't stop its heavy pacing towards them. It was almost reptilian in the body, with a knot of heads at its front that sagged around a gaping mouth.  
  
One of its huge claws raked at the side of the room, dislodging a broken sign which flew ahead and into Onni. He felt a rib crack as the heavy wood pinned him down. His kantele was still in his hand, but his arm was weirdly blooming with pain and numbness at the same time, so it more or less hung by its strap as the monster approached him, jaws wobbling with each languid snap shut.  
  
Emil called out. "Onni!" The name was followed by yet another bomb, which struck the creature on what passed for its neck and engulfed one side of its cluster of heads in flames. Onni felt specks of fire alight on his own face. Three of the heads howled as they were burned into oblivion, but two more were spared by their position on the other side. They rolled their eyes and continued to moan. Another claw swept sideways and caught Emil, throwing him against the wall. Onni couldn't see where he'd gone from his position slumped against the wall. His eyes were fixed on the vision of horror approaching him. The flicker of the fast-dying flames made the movement of the giant towards him almost seem like it happened in hundreds of tiny bursts.  
  
If he'd been able to reach out an arm, he could have touched one of its teeth. It was still snapping as it approached his head. He could feel the foulness of its breath on his skin, even as his breath mask worked to filter it out of the air in his nostrils. Somewhere behind the featureless mental screaming of panic that was freezing him, he wondered if this is how Tuuri felt when she'd been attacked. He would meet her soon. The teeth snapped again, inches from his face, with a force that would burst his head next time the giant moved. He would never find Lalli. Squeezing his eyes shut, he hoped that some day, his little cousin's soul would find its way.  
  
The world cracked like a chicken's neck.


	15. Chapter 15

Emil had fallen on his back hard, the wind being knocked out of him as the final bottle in his hand flew aside and smashed in the corner. He felt his body momentarily short-circuit as he flailed, trying to get his breath back. He scrambled back onto his feet just in time to hear the air-rending crack of a gun and see one of the giant's heads explode. The creature jerked back from where it loomed over Onni, trailing slime from where it had been struck.  
  
From the shadows, a slender figure leapt, landing in a crouch on the giant's neck and driving the butt of a rifle through its final malformed head. It shuddered, sagging flesh rippling and flames still wavering on its mounding shoulders, before slumping back on its haunches dead. The figure leapt off, away from the flames and onto the ground, and the catlike stance he landed in was instantly recognisable.  
  
Two glowing eyes met Emil's. In the smouldering, filthy light of the fire spreading to the edges of the room, Lalli looked utterly feral. The image of him danced between silhouette and full illumination as the flames moved. His clothes were caked with filth and his face, always a little worryingly thin, had transformed into something gaunt and deep-socketed. He was still clinging to his rifle, his breath heavy enough to move his shoulders a little.  
  
As Emil leapt up to run towards him, Lalli flipped the rifle back around and aimed it at his face. Emil froze. "Lalli!"  
  
Onni was flailing underneath the wooden sign, managing to haul himself out a little. " _Lalli?_ "  
  
Lalli started to back away, waving the rifle between the two of them as if to be prepared to shoot either if they moved. Emil held up his hands. "Lalli, we came to get you-"  
  
"I'm not going deeper in there!" His voice was hoarse and wavering.  
  
"We need to get out-"  
  
"No! I won't follow you! I know what you are." Lalli seemed terrified of the two people that had appeared in front of him. His aim of the rifle held much steadier than his voice. He still didn't shoot, looking at Emil with a twisted grief.  
  
Emil kept his hands up and stayed completely still. He didn't know what was going on. This was not the reaction he was expecting.  
  
Onni was still struggling to get out from under the sign. Keeping his hands up, Emil moved very slowly over to him, then worked with him to get him out. When Onni stood up, he immediately leaned on Emil, but fixed his gaze on Lalli. "Lalli! This is no apparition. We've come to take you home."  
  
Lalli kept his rifle up, tense as a coiled spring. His eyes still shone with that fey light Emil had only rarely seen in all the time he'd known him, but his expression wavered slightly. Emil felt Onni shift his weight onto his own feet and took the chance to step forwards, hands still up, very slowly. "Lalli. I'm here. We came after you visited my dream. Please come back with  us." Lalli watched his slow pacing, finger shivering on the trigger, still held back from depressing it by the barest uncertainty. Emil finally got close enough that the end of the rifle was pressed against his chest. He didn't dare try to move fast enough to duck past it.  
  
Acting on some instinct stronger than his fear, he leaned in further, feeling the cold metal against his sternum. With a light touch, he brushed a caked-down lock of hair off Lalli's forehead. Lalli's eyes widened very slightly and began to dim down from the intense blue glow. His lips parted and he made a noise that was first hopeful, then turned into a quiet keen of grief and fear.  
  
Onni was moving towards them. "Lalli, don't shoot-"  
  
Lalli brought his rifle up, yelled "Get down!" and shot. Emil was already feeling the dull ache of his body hitting the floor before he realised what had happened. "Onni! No!"  
  
When he flipped around, he saw that Onni was untouched. The troll that had been hanging off the ceiling behind him dropped to the ground, dead. Emil's moment of horror jerked into relief with an abruptness that left him reeling. Lalli was turning back to the tunnel Onni and Emil had come from, eyes now as wide as they could be. Of course, there were still more trolls coming.  
  
"Onni! The bombs!" Emil heard himself yell, as if listening to someone else's voice.  
  
Some of Onni's bottles had broken when he fell, soaking his leg with fuel that promised to flare up if he mis-stepped. There were still a few on his belt, though, and he grabbed at one. Fire sparked from his hands and caught the cloth, and he managed to use his free hand to throw it in much the way Emil had shown him. It exploded all over the platform, making the trolls writhe and screech, giving them enough time to all turn heel and run together down the wide corridor.  
  
The way was wide enough that even as they sprinted fast enough to put distance behind them, the flames still illuminated tall archways  and columns. The hallways had been made of a few kinds of stone and tile, painted in colours that were still striking after 90 years.  
  
As the smoke followed them, Emil saw a sign start to glow intermittently, almost as if in response to it. "Stairs!"  
  
The two Hotakainens followed the line of his hand and skidded to a halt as well. The sign shone with an eerie green and the image of a human fleeing seemed universal. Emil hoped that the colour choice and directional arrow had also meant "this way to safety" in other countries and times. It clearly seemed plausible to the others too, because they all headed towards it without a word. Emil ran through the door first and was greeted by an open mouth and a claw whipping towards his face. His face felt wet where the troll's spiked limb glanced against it. Lalli followed it past Emil as it pulled back to strike again, slashing with a knife that glowed bright, cleaving its face in two. His momentum carried him forward and he started to lead the way up, calling back at Onni to follow.  
  
The stairway was mostly clear. The cold wind of the outside was starting to be noticable. Onni returned the kantele to his back and waved his hands as he moved upwards, the motion almost like swimming, lighting their way as they lost sight of the fire behind. Finally, they emerged into an area with similar wide steps to the ones they'd descended through, holding each other up from their stumbling as they climbed out onto the surface.  
  
A horrible hissing was growing behind them as trolls of all kinds began to follow in their steps. As they all finally reached the top of the stairs, Onni began to throw sparks at the last of his bombs with shaking hands. The two that he threw down flared enough to fill the entrance with flames and light the scene around them. They had emerged into a thickly snowed street lined with yet more squarish buildings. The clouds had shed a truly massive amount and were finally starting to part a little, letting through tiny patches of stars. Flames cast dancing shadows on the sides of the tall blocks, and the dark shapes of trolls were still visible within the underground network's entrance.  
  
As the three men turned to run, one shadowy troll twisted around itself and keened, then galloped through the flames on chicken-like legs. Its greasy flesh was bubbling with flame, but it leapt forward anyway, throwing itself towards Onni.  
  
Lalli's eyes shone again as, throwing his arms wide in a half-controlled gesture, he called out in a primal, wordless scream. The flames rose up, sparking with a glow even greater than before, and with a supernatural solidness grabbed the troll's scaly limbs. It yowled as it was dragged back into the fire, twitching and finally going quiet as the new power in the flame sizzled it. Lalli's eyes fluttered, then closed as he passed out in the snow.  
  
Emil ducked to his side and picked him up, awkwardly rearranging the rifle that was still grasped in his hand. He was even lighter than he usually was. Why did something taste like blood? The surreal feeling of Lalli actually in his arms again, the pumping adrenaline and the stickiness on his face made it seem like nothing was quite real anymore.  
  
Onni was yelling at him to run. Running happened. They rounded a corner and the dancing firelight cut off, leaving them alone with the snow, concrete and starlight. There was a brightness coming from somewhere. Breath crystallised in the air. The two of them kept running for some amount of time Emil couldn't place, and eventually his legs just ceased to function. He fell to his knees, snow enveloping him up to the hips as he knelt, Lalli still gripped tightly in his arms. He hadn't known it was possible for breathing to hurt this much. Onni sank down next to him, also gasping for air, then looked up, shivering. "Troll." The word was barely a whisper.  
  
It was all knots and pins and eyes, scurrying down the side of a building that was starting to glow at the top, escaping what Emil now recognised as the dawn coming. Both men stayed very still. They had no capacity to fight left in them, but the snow was deep enough to muffle a lot, and it hadn't seen them. They followed the advice both of them had known since they were children. Some god must have been pleased by what they'd done that night, because the old advice held true. After a still, silent, seemingly endless few minutes, it went away. After a little more time, in which the light crept slightly down the side of the building they still had their gazes fixed on, Onni whispered again. "It's gone far enough now."  
  
Emil couldn't even respond at first, and his whisper was harsh when he did. "Shit." He paused to take a deep breath. " _Shit_. We have to get out of here." He finally registered that the air was still bitterly cold, and freezing something on his face solid. He touched the tip of his tongue to the weird tang on his lips. "What happened to my face?" He must have been pretty far gone not to notice whatever had caused this.  
  
"You have a cut. That'll probably scar." Onni's response was blankly informative, as he was suddenly distracted by prodding himself in the rib and wincing.  
  
"You can get a scar on your _face_?" He was still processing the last few hours in a daze, and the nonsense response fell out of his mouth without his brain being involved at all.  
  
Onni just looked at him. The utter incredulity of his expression was more real, live human emotion than he'd shown in days. The shifting light finally reached the ground.  
  
They eventually found the energy to get up and walk again. The part of the city they were in was totally unfamiliar. Escaping might prove just as big a task as defeating the underground tunnels. Lalli remained totally unresponsive, his face so pale it gleamed in the morning light just like the snow around him.  
  
Emil didn't really want to give Onni a turn at carrying him, but his arms felt like they'd disintegrate if any more demands were made on them now. At least when Onni picked Lalli up, wet-eyed and tender, he also held him as if he never wanted to let him go again.


	16. Chapter 16

Lalli was drifting. It was cold here, the chill of rock in shadow, or of the part of a lake deep enough to stay untouched by summer sun. He clung to a memory, trying to access it. Being small, diving deep down, holding his breath and paddling to see if he could reach the bottom. Trying was like the struggle of a chick to escape an egg. Perhaps also like reaching the bottom of the lake and kicking against it to rise, only to find it too soft to propel you. Perhaps like the grip on your chest of staying underwater just a little too long...  
  
Warmth entered, a sunbeam stronger than the others. He could climb it like a rope, and he did. Instead of the freshness of air, he felt warm fur against his cheek and the rumble of a purr in his ears.  
  
He woke up, the sensation of musky fur transforming into that of soft, clean hair. It was a bright summer morning, and Emil was sleeping in this comfortable bed with him, gently curled into his shoulder. The moment Lalli's eyes were fully open, Emil propped himself up on his elbow, golden hair tumbling around his face. "Did you know you have the whole day free? We could go fishing. I changed my mind about it being boring. You're right, it's nice just to sit." He looked deeply content.  
  
Lalli stretched back and pulled Emil on top of him, running fingers down his bare spine. Emil smiled and kissed him, his mouth melting into it like butter on hot pancakes, just as deliciously salty-sweet. When Emil pulled away and asked if he wouldn't like to go enjoy the day, that was sweet too, even if Lalli did want the brush of hands against his hipbones to lead somewhere. It would, though, later. Now it was time to go and enjoy the sun coming through the window.  
  
Emil led Lalli out the door, and he fell through light again, back into the depths of cold.  
  
He hated the strange feeling he got sometimes of having been somewhere or done something before in a way he couldn't place. As his senses slowly recovered their function, one by one, the unwelcome feeling was very strong. The trolls were still all around him. He'd fallen asleep again, and it was a miracle he'd woken up alive. Every time he fell asleep and awoke in this place, it was harder to remember that he had even been looking for the way out. How many days ago had his mind been caught, leaving him on a spiralling path closer to death, always on the edge of sleepwalking into the mouth of a giant?  
  
Lalli realised two things at once. One was that in the whole time he'd been wandering dazed through the underground tunnels, he'd had no awareness of the process that was happening. Something had changed, if he was thinking about this. The second was that, despite the ground he lay on being hard, it wasn't conducting heat away from him like it usually would. Something fluffy tickled his exposed skin. He was wrapped in some kind of fur, and it smelled... familiar. Famili _al_.  
  
He finally felt within himself enough to move his limbs, and a life beside him flared with wakefulness. "Onni! He's awake!" Emil's voice was a loud whisper.  
  
Lalli opened his eyes. The break between dream and reality was not as large as it had seemed. Emil had hurried over and was looming over him, drinking in the sight of Lalli's face, looking at him as if he was the best thing he'd ever seen. Cold, trembling hands gently encircled Lalli's face, and the spell was broken again. Details that separated this from dreams leapt out like a troll in the night. Emil's face had been lacerated, the space between his eyebrows and one cheek crossed by a cut. It was probably only about half a centimeter deep, but it was enough for the skin to have popped open a little fingernail's width at its widest point, leaving the barely-cleaned gash very obvious. He was filthy, even his usually perfectly-groomed hair full of soot.  
  
The clean brightness of the dream Emil may have been all gone, but the softness remained, his thumbs running over Lalli's cheekbones and his eyes welling up with joy. Lalli reached out and touched Emil where he'd been hurt, lightly placing just one gloved finger against the wound. "Something cut you." Speaking was difficult.  
  
Emil's smile was broken, but present. "We had a hard time getting you out of there."  
  
There were still trolls nearby. "It's dangerous here."  
  
Onni's voice came from the side, a whisper barely audible through something muffling his voice. "We know. We're still on the edge of the city. We took shelter in the first house we found without trolls in every room. Right now we're relying on the cold to keep them asleep."  
  
Lalli had known Onni was there. He could feel his power, and Emil had said his name as he was waking, but as he actually spoke, the knowledge finally dug itself into his brain. Onni was out here, despite the fact that _here_ was deep, deep in the Silent World. Sitting up and gesturing Emil out of the way, Lalli looked at him. He was wearing a breath mask, but otherwise was much like he always was, albeit with clothes and hair blackened by smoke. Onni approached, looking concerned despite the fact that surely, he was the one people should be concerned about.  
  
"What are you doing here?"  
  
"I came to find you. I learned you were in danger when you visited Emil's dream." Onni's reply was so simple, as if it made some kind of sense for him to be here doing this.  
  
"You're not immune."  
  
"I've been made aware."  
  
Lalli felt an overwhelming urge to just go back to sleep and not handle what he was hearing. During his wander through the tunnels he'd prayed for escape, but now Onni was out here, in danger because of him. Realising this was one of the worst feelings he'd ever experienced. Regret weighed him down like water in a rag.  
  
Onni crouched down next to him, hands hovering anxiously just short of touch. "Can you stand?"  
  
Lalli freed himself from the cloak that had been wrapped around him. Onni's. Of course that was who he had been smelling through the smoke and troll slime. Failing to have placed that was surely a sign of how far from familiar things they all were.  Emil steadied him as he got to his feet. "I guess so."  
  
The two of them looked so happy to see him. Onni's face never showed it as markedly as Emil's did, of course, but it was clear by the way he bent down and wrapped the cloak back around Lalli. It reminded him of the first time he'd caught some childhood illness after losing their parents, teenage Onni clueless and terrified as he did his best to remember what one did for a feverish nine-year-old. At the time, Lalli had known no better than to resent it.  
  
Two people - very important people - had come here over however much distance it was, down into that hellhole, just for the chance to pull him out of it. Both of them could have died. At least one of them still probably would, all on account of him. It was a mix of feelings that Lalli's heart just couldn't take.  
  
"He still looks really out of it." Emil was speaking to Onni. "I'm definitely going to see if there's anything edible left when I do that raid. Are you sure you're okay here with him still kind of...?"  
  
"We'll have to be. It seems quiet here for now."  
  
Emil took Lalli gently by the shoulders. "I'll be back as soon as I can, okay? Hang in there." He cracked open the door of the drafty room they were sitting in and eased himself out through the tiniest slot possible. Lalli couldn't find words until he'd been gone some time.  
  
"Where's he going?"  
  
Onni was sitting back down and gesturing at Lalli to follow him. "We're on the very edge of town. There appear to be some very large shops out here, and Emil had the idea of repeating something he says you did last time you and he were in the Silent World together. Apparently such places have all sorts of goods, and we might find a tent for the walk back."  
  
Lalli sat, shivering. He felt so cold despite the extra layer of Onni's cloak, and suddenly became aware that he had no idea when it was he had last eaten. "Did you walk all the way here?" He couldn't have been down there a month, surely.  
  
"We found a car and got it working, but we couldn't find it on the way out. This city is a maze."  
  
"Oh." His mind was still turning over the danger to his rescuers, guilt gumming up the process like flour in a sauce. Onni didn't _feel_ like Tuuri had begun to, before, but then that feeling had taken some time to grow, and perhaps it differed from person to person...  
  
The level of sadness he felt was exhausting. Bringing his knees up to his chin and pulling the cloak over his head, he fell silent, drifting almost into a doze. His senses were still awake to the distant sleepy movements of trolls, but there was no further conversation, Onni sitting with his watchful concern and little else.  
  
A spark of life, and the door moving open a tiny bit. Emil was shoving bundles of cloth, a familiar-looking kind of canvas bag, and some tins through the gap, then following them before he closed it. He looked very pleased with himself. "Onni, they also had clothes. You can get rid of the burning. I brought a few, I don't know what fits you." Onni looked through the pile of various pairs of trousers Emil had retrieved and eventually settled on two layers that looked like very finely woven wool of some kind. "Is there any water? I feel I should wash off whatever that fuel was."  
  
Emil shook his head. "All frozen, but I found this little pan near the tent, so we should be able to melt some snow."  
  
As quietly as possible, they all worked together to light a small fire near the window. Luckily, despite the poor construction of the room, some parts had remained dry enough to break up and light. The first taste of water was like breathing air after nearly drowning. Lalli could feel his pores opening and the fuzz in his head clearing. It made such a difference the shock was slightly painful. Emil and Onni looked like they were having much the same experience. With the last of the water, Onni rinsed his leg where some kind of burn had begun to form. Lalli's breath caught as he noticed that an under-layer of skin looked very dangerously exposed by the corrosion. If infected material had seeped through with whatever substance had burned him, this would be a death sentence.  
  
Onni seemed satisfied enough with the relief of the icy water. Having his legs bare in this weather was making him shiver. The first pair of the scavenged trousers clung to his skin with an unnatural stretchiness, but the second layer sat more normally, baggy and grey. The drawcord at the top seemed to hold them up decently.  
  
"I did find some food." Emil was arranging his pile of tins in a line. "Or, well, I think so. Most of them had gone a funny shape, but I took a few that look normal."  
  
The first tin they opened was full of nothing but dried black slime. Clearly, the lack of warping was just due to any rotting fumes having long escaped. The second one, though, was miraculously normal-seeming. It was small, and some kind of tiny white grain was covered in a sweet sauce. The other two insisted Lalli ate first. He consumed it so fast he thought he might be sick. The feeling of food hitting his stomach was another moment that made him feel very suddenly more like a human being.  
  
Only four of the tins showed no sign of a strange smell, but the mix of sausage, acidic red goo and strange little white beans inside most of them was very heartening. The fourth tin contained only a thick white liquid, which tasted strongly of milk. Despite the horror of the situation around him, Lalli couldn't help but pause over how overpoweringly good it was. It was sticky and jaw-achingly sweet. Even between three of them, it was almost too much to handle.  
  
"You look a bit more alive, Lalli." Emil was so pleased. The guilt hit him again, but at least now action was possible. The three of them set off, Onni tying their little pan to the strap of his kantele and Emil hoisting the tent bag over his shoulder by its handle. Outside, it was nearly totally dark again, but with a real scout present the way free of the city became clear quickly. Within a couple of hours, they were truly back within the trees. Their broad trunks still sheltered trolls, but sleeping ones, and nothing leapt out at them. The moon, despite being very much on the wane now, was still enough light on the forest floor for them not to need a lamp. The snow that had fallen while Lalli was underground was freezing, but thick and protective.  
  
It turned out Emil and Onni hadn't slept for over a day. Neither of them could quite count up how many hours it had been. Emil's attempts to work it out on his fingers somehow were knocked out by woozy yawning. He and Onni passed out together underneath the latter's big cloak almost as soon as the tent was set up, leaving Lalli sitting cross-legged outside with his rifle. One more day of sleep deprivation would be worth it while they escaped the thickness of trolls around this city. With good time made on one more day's travel, it might be acceptably safe to stop watching them. As much as he hated the idea now, he knew he would need to rest eventually. The road back home would be very, very long.


	17. Chapter 17

Emil had made sure his hat was jammed firmly on his head before he slept, the flaps tied underneath his chin, and then tucked all his limbs very close to Onni. Even though all their clothes, Onni was one of those extremely warm people, like a stove to sleep next to. Emil hadn't slept very close to that many people in his life, but he remembered dozing off next to Mikkel once and noticing that some people seemed to just generate heat more than others. How fortunate that Onni happened to be one of them, and was far past the point of caring about sharing his cloak, or about Emil pressing himself into his side during the night.  
  
He still woke shivering. Fur cloak or not, the ground under this tarpaulin was cold, and his coat only protected him so much. His lips had gotten even drier in the night. Onni was still passed out, presumably kept soundly asleep by his lucky tendency to repel the cold. Emil sat up and unzipped the tent, finding to his dismay that the outside was actually colder. Lalli was sitting there, though, quiet but alive. His eyes looked so big in his under-nourished face. He just watched mutely as Onni was woken by the cold breeze entering the tent, then followed Emil out.  
  
After making enough water for everyone to drink and for Emil to finally clean the rest of the blood off his face, they set about finding more food. The pockets of former human dwelling did stretch out past the edge of Moscow for a long way, and when in the late morning Emil made his cautious way towards raiding a small shop that still peeled with bright paint, he found more of the tins of condensed milk. The weird overlay of blue triangles and bold МОЛОКО they had here were very memorable, and Lalli had seemed to find this food a new and exciting experience yesterday. A surprising number of them still looked okay, so he bundled in all he could carry with the assorted other finds. Returning to where Lalli was guarding Onni, he managed to stuff a few of them into the tent bag for later emergencies, watching Lalli demolish most of a tin.  
  
It was a strangely uneventful day. Emil felt like they should be somehow celebrating the success they'd had rescuing Lalli, but then, he was still barely awake after guarding them all night. Emil couldn't help looking at him every few minutes, in slight awe of the fact he was really here with them. He'd really started to believe a little that Onni might be right about this being a mission to send on Lalli's soul rather than retrieve his whole self. The fact that Lalli was here, seeming more or less intact, was a miracle. As they walked through the forest, the temperature finally started to rise a little. The vortex of snow that Onni had called down was not as thick on the ground here, although it was still thankfully cold enough to stay frozen.  
  
Emil tramped along at a regular fast pace, tent bag tapping lightly against his side as his boots sprung from the snow. His thoughts were full of the question of how many more of those milk tins he could get hold of, and how many he could feed Lalli before even he got sick of the sugar. Eating that stuff by the spoonful had done a great job of making Emil fat as a child. It would fit the purpose of fixing the worrying hollowness to Lalli's face as well. When Onni paused and winced climbing over a decaying fence, finally thinking to mention that he was quite sure he'd cracked a rib, Emil felt a little bad for being so preoccupied he hadn't even noticed his unwillingness to take deep breaths.  
  
"Should we slow down?"  
  
Onni waved a hand dismissively. "I'm fine."  
  
Lalli emerged from his sleep-deprived daze to comment. "We're almost out beyond where people were thickest. Less trolls sleeping by our camp if we walk fast."  
  
Emil didn't like seeing the both of them pushing through to walk faster, but suspected everyone's sleep would suffer again if they didn't get out past the worst of the trolls. They all returned to the silent, steady tramping. Now that he was walking through the forest rather than keeping his eyes on the road, Emil noticed that there was something strange about it. Rather than the landscape being totally dominated by spruces and pines, far more of the trees seemed to have lost their leaves. Their trunks seemed broader than those of trees in the northern taiga they'd all grown up with. He mentioned this to Lalli, receiving only a small hum of acknowledgement in return.  
  
It wasn't dark quite as soon as it would have been in Finland, but still the day was far too short to be convenient. Lalli seemed to feel that it might be acceptable to sleep where they were after they'd walked for several more hours through the dark, although Onni remained on edge. Emil remembered how far out they'd been when Onni had first needed guarding to sleep, and wondered how many days' walk it could possibly be until they reached that point again. Surprisingly, he relented, and Emil was grateful for it. Fitting 3 people inside that tent seemed to be what tipped it over into something like warmth.  
  
This time, they made some effort to arrange the fur on the floor and everyone's coats over them in a pile. Onni's comments and the rise in temperature had brought on some niggling anxiety, but logically speaking it was still colder than most of their time in Denmark had been. Emil felt real relief when Lalli let himself be tucked between the two of them. He passed out almost instantly once he'd settled down, which left Emil and Onni with a little awkwardness arranging themselves. They eventually gave up on trying to maintain any sense of distance, the two of them wrapping themselves tightly around either side of Lalli in a protective cocoon. Emil fell asleep hoping that in the morning, the fact they'd managed another tinned dinner and something like a warm night of sleep would have Lalli talking again.  
  
He still didn't say anything beyond the bare minimum when they all woke, but the way he sprung out of the tent and began to scout ahead of them was heartening. When he set to work supplementing their fast-dwindling stash of tins with hunting, Emil felt like this must be a sign of him perking up. Lalli had always seemed to take specific joy in being the scourge of all rabbits. He didn't smile when he broke down every edible part of his catch into a slightly horrible stew, but still, it was early days. He'd been through a lot, and it was normal that he might not want to speak much. If Emil knew anything about him, it was that pushing him to share too early was just going to make him miserable.  
  
On the fourth day, the two of them left Onni by himself for the first time. They remained easily within calling distance, and had left him in their camp with the rifle. Emil hoped he wouldn't have to use it, not only because nobody wanted another troll encounter, but also because Lalli's supply of ammo was down to a mere handful. Lalli was hacking into the bark of a birch tree, exposing the tender strips beneath the hard surface and handing Emil the parts that bled with sap. He had certainly come to life on a physical level, but his face was still too carefully neutral.  
  
"Why did you bring him?" Lalli said it without taking his eyes off the task at hand. Emil took a deep breath. So, that was it.  
  
"I wouldn't say I _brought_ him."  
  
"How did he end up out here then?" Lalli had stopped cutting and turned to face Emil. His expression was still nearly unreadable.  
  
"I told him what I'd seen in my dream and he just - he just decided that he had the best chance of finding you. I thought he might be able to do something with magic, but he said we needed to come here ourselves, and I came along to try to protect him, I mean I would have come to find you anyway but the point is I didn't drag him out here..."  
  
"He just decided." Lalli was looking Emil directly in the face in a way he almost never did. The idea that he might suspect a lie here stung deeply.  
  
"Honestly, I told him it was a bad idea." Despite the fact it was true, Emil felt weirdly guilty. He hadn't exactly complained very hard, and although he felt real fear on Onni's behalf, the fact he'd been able to find Lalli made it hard to truly regret not stopping him.  
  
Lalli was still looking at him. Wordlessly, he turned back to cutting bark.  
  
"I'm sorry." The words tumbled out of Emil's mouth.  
  
"Why? You didn't do anything wrong." Lalli was back to talking towards the tree. His tone was bitter, but the sentiment seemed genuine.  
  
Emil thought about it. The response had been more automatic than anything else.  
  
"I'm sorry because everything is terrible and I can't fix it."  
  
Lalli paused for a second in his task, taking a deep breath in and out. "Nobody can. We just have to wait and see." There was some softness to the resigned way he absolved Emil of blame. There was silence for a moment, before Emil spoke again.  
  
"I don't think he got hurt in there-"  
  
"One cut, Emil. Just one." The edge was back. "What if something got in through that burn?"  
  
Emil didn't know what to say. He'd assumed things were going much better than they were, yet again. "When will we know? Two weeks, right?" While he of course knew about various quarantining procedures, he still had exactly one experience of waiting closely on a friend's outcome, and he'd acted... cluelessly, to say the least.  
  
"You usually know sooner. I've never seen it actually take that long." Lalli stabbed into the tree with slightly more force than was merited. This time, Emil knew better than to try to convince him things would be fine. Onni's insistence that the other two finish the weird bark soup, claiming that he really didn't need more, suddenly seemed very dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So a few people have asked what the title of this fic actually is, and given that I'm home sick all day with some kind of gross stomach bug I guess I have time to explain now! It's named after a song by a fairly popular Finnish band, Mokoma, and it's somewhat thematically relevant - the title means "the moon gets its power from the sun". There is an acoustic version out there if you want to listen to it but don't like heavy music. Here's a translation of the lyrics, unfortunately they really sound much better in Finnish:
> 
> "I tore myself away and escaped,  
> I ran deep in to the forest, and deep I got.  
> My escape was full of hope  
> I thought I could survive alone but I didn't know - I need you.
> 
> The moon gets its power from the sun,  
> And even though it appears glowing,  
> It doesn't share its light alone.  
> It gets its power from the sun,  
> The sun is the place from which  
> the moon just borrows its light.
> 
> I'm alone and alone I will probably stay,  
> I wonder if I have a place  
> to lean my head.  
> I tried to achieve greater happiness,  
> I don't yearn for gold anymore, I'll settle for silver.
> 
> The moon gets its power from the sun,  
> And even though its appears glowing,  
> It doesn't share its light alone.  
> It gets its power from the sun,  
> The sun is the place from which  
> the moon just borrows its light"


	18. Chapter 18

"The note said he'd be back sometime in the week after he left." Sini's voice was tight.  
  
"Ugh." Jaana wasn't really up for this conversation, or any conversation. She had really thought she was going to get away without too much of the nausea, having gone well into December still feeling more or less alright. Unfortunately, she hadn't escaped all of it. Everything just smelled so _bad_ today. She hated feeling like this new hyper-sensitivity was totally arbitrary.  
  
"It's been just over two weeks now." Sini was fiddling with the hem of her shirt.  
  
"I know." Of course, Jaana was worried too. She just didn't know what to do about it. Lifting her face out of her hands, she tried to think and didn't get very far. "Why is he like this?" Sini's expression made it clear that she thought Jaana was being a little harsh. Given that he might well be dead, the reaction probably was inappropriate, but making the mental shift over to considering that aspect was not something Jaana really wanted to do.  
  
There was a letter from Emil's aunt on the table, and none of them had opened it. Nobody was sure exactly what the right thing to do was in this situation. They'd discussed whether to send her something letting her know what was going on, because she did seem to be the person he wrote to most. Nobody really knew what to write, or wanted to be the one to write it even if they had. They had decided it was best to wait for real news, at least for now. Sending an unprompted letter, only to tell someone who had no way to influence the situation about how uncertain it was, just seemed cruel.  
  
Miri and Laura finally got home, Sanna in tow. Laura was tentatively excited as they all settled in to eat dinner. "So, Sanna and I have been discussing the situation."  
  
Sanna nodded quietly. Despite being a regular in this house for well over a month now, she was still always a little quiet. Jaana had overheard Laura reassuring her that everyone here did really like her, but she still seemed quite nervous about everyone's opinion. Usually it was nothing but a good thing that their group seemed so single-minded and familial to anyone looking in - acting like an unassailable hivemind had certainly been useful last time Virpi had tried to pile more work on them - but Jaana did see that from a certain angle it might seem intimidating. Laura was right, though. When she'd left one day, Sini had waited for her to be out of earshot then announced with great feeling "Laura, she is _so_ sweet". Nobody had disagreed at all.  
  
Laura was waiting for Sanna to elaborate, and when she didn't, spoke again. "We were talking about her maybe trying to get in contact with Onni."  
  
"I think I might be able to. It's complicated." Sanna was still nervous.  
  
"We understand there's no guarantees with these things." Miri was definitely interested in the suggestion, but still spoke carefully. They were all aware that mages walked a dangerous path sometimes in sleep, even if the details were a little murky to those with no training, and Miri's caution was shored up by having a touch of the mage's dreaming herself.  
  
"Yes. Only if you feel up to it." Sini was just as excited, but also just as wary of pressuring her.  
  
Sanna looked at Laura for a moment before continuing. "I'm worried about them too. And if they have found Lalli somehow, I'd like to know how he's doing as well." It did make sense. She and Lalli would never have approached each other for friendship independently, but the contact they'd been put into by circumstance had started to produce a quiet understanding between them. Given she still didn't know that many people here well, Lalli being sent away hadn't been nice for her either.  
  
Jaana felt like she should offer something. "Like the others said, no pressure, but if you could get any news we'd appreciate it."  
  
"I'll do my best. It might be some time. Trying on different nights and stuff, you know."  
  
Dinner stayed down, at least, even though the last few bites seemed risky. Jaana didn't feel too bad for the rest of the evening.


	19. Chapter 19

Onni didn't _feel_ sick. Nothing itched besides the burn healing on his leg, nothing really pained him except the twinge of his rib whenever he lifted something. Realising that he didn't actually know what this was meant to feel like was strange. Of course, he'd known people dying of the Rash, but the very nature of it had meant he'd been isolated from them. Asking for a description of what it felt like to know this was happening to you hadn't been on his mind at all. For all he knew, this could be exactly what it felt like. He hadn't exactly removed many of his clothes at any point, camping in the snow, and while it always seemed like the Rash must hurt - he'd never asked how much.   
  
Despite having come out of Moscow with little visible injury, he didn't have high expectations. Surely, at some point in that deep underground tunnel, he'd received some scrape or fleck of spit in the eye that would have infected him. He acted as though there was the chance of it not being so, but still tried not to be too much of a burden on the supplies. There'd be no use for a little extra fat on his side once he was dead, and the other two had such a long journey home. Their interactions were clearly strained by the unspoken uncertainty. They had never been particularly openly affectionate in front of him, but the casual tenderness they usually displayed was so distinctive and clear that the change was jarring.   
  
Lalli's quietness was breaking his heart. He still did everything that he might need to do to keep things moving, and thankfully included eating and sleeping in that routine. Onni watched Emil trying to counteract how starved Lalli looked, hoping this would continue once the two had been left alone.   
  
Days passed. The forest was crisp and quiet. As they got further and further away from the city, it was almost peaceful. They encountered a roaming beast that had surely been a bear, and the two mages felt it coming a long way off. They might have been able to totally avoid it, but it seemed right to take the time to shoot such a creature. Emil had made as if to call the beast straightforwardly by the real name of what it had been, Lalli shushing him before the second syllable of _karhu_ could leave his mouth. He got the meaning of Onni's euphemistic _the honey-handed_ and _he-of-the-forest_ eventually, opting to stop referring to the bear at all and just watching respectfully as Lalli found a tree for its skull. The dim December sky was moody behind the silhouette of it as they moved on.   
  
"It's been two weeks, Onni." Emil's voice was quiet. Lalli was a little way away from them, perched on the side of a fallen tree, seemingly trying to eke the meaning of life's questions out of contemplating the forest shadows. They'd made their way through a substantial amount of the endless forest that covered the way north, avoiding even the smallest villages wherever possible, always alert for signs of danger. The way had been slow, but steady, and with a breath mask on Onni's face the whole time. Lalli looked up as Onni stood, ready to know the answer once and for all.   
  
It was not a pleasant experience. The only foolproof-seeming way was for Onni to strip to his skin in a snow-filled clearing. Emil had the decency to stuff some of Onni's under-layers into his own shirt while it happened, a move that was far from dignified but, given the cold, considerate. Lalli froze for a moment when Onni momentarily took off his breath mask, then relaxed as he recognised that it was just the wear on his skin from the straps' constant friction. With the mask off, the intense vulnerability of being naked in a strange winter forest became almost unbearable, and he put it back on as quickly as possible. Still, he waited while Lalli inspected every inch of him for signs of the Rash. It probably wasn't necessary to lift his feet up one by one to inspect the soles, nor to part his hair and inspect the skin on his scalp. By now, it would have been far more obvious than that, but Lalli checked anyway. Finally, he was satisfied with what he'd seen.   
  
"Nothing." Emil heard Lalli's words and handed Onni his clothes back. He put them on as rapidly as possible.   
  
Sitting by their little campfire to warm up, Onni felt numb, and it wasn't just the cold. He had been working so hard on emotionally preparing for death that he was in slight shock at it no longer seeming inevitable. The fact he now felt fear again of the distance between here and home was jarring and surreal. Lalli and Emil sat by the fire with him, uneasily watching the way he stared into it.   
  
"I'm going for a walk."  
  
Lalli started. "Where?"   
  
"Just to be by myself for a little bit."  
  
"We _just_ learned that you're not infected." Lalli was clearly agitated at the idea of compromising this newfound safety even a little.   
  
"I'll know if something's coming. I won't go far, I promise."   
  
"Take the rifle." Emil handed it to him. Onni did, and wandered a little way into the forest. Lalli's fear was in him too, and he stayed well within a distance where he could call out or sprint back. Leaning against a tree, he let the burning in his throat finally escape as long, quiet sobs. He couldn't believe where this had almost gone. He'd considered so seriously just saving them all the wait. It had seemed like a logical thought at the time, freeing up his warm gear and share of the food as soon as possible. Guilt had competed with other forms of guilt, the picture of Lalli's face when they'd find him looming very large for something he by definition wouldn't see.   
  
Realising that long-term plans were again something he had to think about was the most bizarre feeling he'd ever had. He wouldn't have known how to explain it to the others if he'd tried. "In shock because you might live" seemed quite incorrect as an emotional reaction, but there it was.   
  
He finally finished crying about as much as he needed to and walked back to their camp. With the last of the daylight, he could see something that made him hang back in the trees a moment. In front of the slow drift of smoke from the fire, Lalli and Emil were standing in a tight embrace, Lalli's face buried in Emil's shoulder. It felt like a moment he shouldn't intrude on, so he just waited as Emil pulled away a little and cupped Lalli's face, saying something quietly to him before stretching up to kiss his forehead. Lalli's eyes drifted away from Emil and landed on where Onni was in the trees, Emil's gaze eventually following. He jerked back from Lalli, looking awkward, and Onni tried to pretend he'd been approaching the camp as normal.   
  
During a small break the next day, Lalli made an announcement. "We shouldn't go back the way we came."  
  
"What other way is there?" Onni wasn't sure any of them knew another way, at least not well enough.   
  
"I saw a map before I left. There's no city on the northeast side of the big lake. Not like the one on the close side. And once we were around the lake we could go right across to northern Saimaa."  
  
"I did wonder what we'd do if we found another giant passing that massive city." Emil still looked on the fence about this plan. "How much further is it to go around?"  
  
"It's a long way. But this has been a long way too, and it was all still safer than two days near that." Lalli seemed very convinced.   
  
Emil sighed. "I keep worrying about what everyone at home is thinking now. Especially the kids." He really didn't look happy at all about that part. "You're right, though. Now that there's a chance we might all make it home, a few extra weeks are worth it."  
  
Onni felt a little guilt too at the idea of leaving those he worked with in uncertainty for so long, as well as the others being obliged to the same because of him. Perhaps he should start making an effort to contact some mage in Keuruu, although he really had no idea who might be best to try. He knew Lalli was absolutely right in his assessment. With a scout's woodcraft skills and Emil's increasing knack for picking tins out of decaying village stores, they were doing very well sticking to the areas that had never been heavily populated. There was a long winter ahead of them yet, and with two mages in tow no cold-resistant beast could get truly close without detection.  
  
The winter solstice was so close now that night usually fell long before they stopped walking. Through gaps in the frosty trees, Onni could see a clear sky. He had read at some point that there were places somewhere in the world where even the stars looked completely different, but this didn't seem to be one of them. The road ahead would be long and tiring, but the north star he'd always lived under hung bright in the sky, ready for him to follow it home.   
  



	20. Chapter 20

Siv hadn't worried a huge amount when her first letter went unreplied to. At first, she'd put it down to the bad time Emil seemed to be having, and sent a follow-up just to let him know everything was still fine on their end. He had gotten into the habit of writing weekly, but it wasn't as if they'd ever agreed he was obliged to.  
  
When the second letter was ignored as well, she wondered if she'd said something that had upset him. It didn't seem at all like him to ignore someone as a response to conflict, but then, she was starting to find him less extremely predictable than she used to. Maybe there had been something. Her letter the next week queried whether there was something preventing him responding. She thought she'd gotten across that she was actually somewhat worried, and was fully expecting an apologetic response sometime the next week.    
  
When he didn't reply to that, she started to think that him being in the middle of a bad time when the silence started might be cause for more worry rather than less. It had been a month since the last update from him, and while he'd seemed to be coping better with Lalli being sent away on some mission, the letters immediately prior had contained little but anxious rambling about the topic. It started to seem plausible that he'd gone and done something extremely stupid.  
  
"Do you think something's happened to him?"  
  
Torbjörn looked up from the task of getting between Håkan's crayon-filled hands and the table. "It's possible? It's not like he wrote home much in the whole first summer he was out there. Maybe Lalli came back and he's been too busy celebrating."  
  
"For three weeks?"  
  
"Well, I don't know. They're both young men and-"  
  
"Can you be serious for a moment?"  
  
"I am being serious! He could have gotten distracted by anything. You know what he's like."  
  
Siv just made a disgruntled noise. Maybe he was right. It did really seem like Emil had changed somewhat in the time since he'd abruptly moved to Finland, but then, the fact he'd made that choice in the first place did still mark him as bit strange and impulsive. Being a little flaky with replying to letters wasn't exactly wildly out of character. It was just that it really had seemed that he'd started to become more reliable, and what remaining impulsiveness he had could lead in far worse directions than forgetting to write for a month. She really wished she actually had the contact details of anyone he knew there. With hindsight, the oversight seemed glaring.   
  
When she was back in the study, she dug out the leaflet she'd picked up last time the ferry people had their little stall in town. The front of it was emblazoned with a reminder that civilian journeys were cheaper in the winter. She flipped through it, trying to do some mental calculations regarding the cost of tickets and babysitters. There had been many assurances already that she would be welcome to visit any time she decided to come. Failing to take Emil up on it so far had just been due to a mix of a busy life and a slight aversion to visiting anywhere that was still that ... extremely rustic.  
  
She put the leaflet back for now. Maybe one more letter expressing that she really would like to hear from him, before she did anything like that. Although really, it would be good to visit and see his face again. Even without the worry, it wasn't as if she had _no_ reason.  
  
"I'm _sure_ he's fine, Siv. You look so morbid." Torbjörn was watching her seal the letter with just a touch of exasperation.  
  
"I suppose you're probably right." Siv sent it and tried not to think about the topic for at least a week.


	21. Chapter 21

The way they'd taken, bearing mostly north and slightly to the west, had mostly avoided even the slightest sign of human settlement. Sometimes, though, they would approach the limits of a village, and Emil would make his way in to raid yet another tiny store. All of them had at least a few tins, and he'd slowly grown confident in his ability to pick out the ones that would contain something edible. Somewhere along the way, in an area Lalli assured them would be near the shore of the big lake if they were further to the west, he had gotten slightly too confident and ignored a faint tangy smell that he shouldn't have.  
  
Throwing up so much that his stomach painfully spasmed trying to find more to eject wasn't even the worst part. Shitting in the woods was never exactly a pleasant experience to begin with, but the latter stage of his body reacting to the bad soup was potentially the most disgusting Emil had ever felt in his life. He had really thought that he would get through this world without using tree bark to scrape like that, such a volume of gross liquid away from such a delicate place. His half-considered plan to scrub a bit with packed fistfuls of snow just left ice on hairs where ice truly should not be. He definitely did not feel adequately clean when he returned to camp and crawled back into the tent they'd set up. Walking any more today with his guts angrily rearranging themselves was not going to happen.  
  
Lalli poked his head into the tent as Emil lay there on his side with his boots hanging out of the door, trying not to put pressure on his stomach. "Hey." He sat down behind him, ducking to fit his head under the canvas as he sat cross-legged, his ankles and feet resting against Emil's back.  
  
"Onni says you're probably going to feel this bad for a while."  
  
"I'm glad I ate it rather than you, though." Despite the horrible time he was having, Emil could recognise that he was capable of surviving it. Lalli probably was as well, but despite it being almost a month since they'd left Moscow, the long days of walking, scouting and hunting hadn't made it easy for him to put any weight back on. He didn't know what damage not being able to eat for a couple of days might still do to him.  
  
"Well, I wouldn't have."  
  
Emil groaned and stopped talking. That was true. Lalli probably was smarter than to eat things that smelled weird.  
  
"Why are you glad it was you and not me?"  
  
"You're still so skinny. I don't know. You might die." Emil felt his guts twist again. "Uggh. Oh, I am so, so stupid." He couldn't believe he'd done this to himself. Yes, boiled rabbit parts and tree bark were incredibly bland, and the ever-present condensed milk was getting old, but at least they'd made his stomach hurt less rather than more.  
  
Lalli hummed, starting to run his fingers through Emil's hair. "Mmm, a bit. We can wait, though. It's fairly safe here."  
  
Emil hadn't seen a mirror since he left Finland, and it was probably for the best. His hat had stayed on his head for almost the entire time they'd been out here, unavoidable in the growing cold and only removed for activities like throwing up today. The locks that Lalli was working his fingers through were flat and greasy, and being in pain was making him sweat in a way that made it even more disgusting. Now that he was already feeling a bit sorry for himself, it was easy to dwell on the fact that he also hadn't found a mirror to see what had happened to his face yet. From the warped-looking reflection he'd caught a glimpse of in various surfaces while raiding stores, it looked like it must be hideous. So far, surviving out here had been too urgent to think about things like that too much, but in this moment it was extremely upsetting to think about.  
  
Lalli was singing something under his breath as he brushed his fingers over Emil's skull, fluffing up the limp hair and rubbing his scalp with careful fingertips. Emil didn't know if it was just the distraction of it feeling so nice or some magic in Lalli's voice that made the nausea ease a little, but it did. He was still somehow sweaty despite the cold, and the disgusting time he'd been having in the woods had really brought home how much he generally stank from travel. Continuing to lie on his side, he let his mind drift as Lalli's hands and almost-certain magic soothed him.  
  
It felt kind of miraculous that Lalli seemingly didn't mind touching him when he was like this. He still found Lalli wanting to do that slightly surprising at the best of times. Being a fat, effeminate teenager with no social skills was behind him now, but the lessons about how much he could expect people to be attracted to him had come at a pretty formative time. Of course, these days he usually put in a lot more effort, and thought that with constant work he ended up kind of acceptable. Now, though, there was nothing about him he could see anyone finding attractive. Despite how horrible he felt, the thought that maybe Lalli really, truly wasn't put off by this did make some kind of butterflies flutter in his stomach.  
  
Oh. Oh no, that wasn't butterflies. Emil's eyes widened with alarm. He scrambled out of the tent and proceeded at a stiff-legged run back to the woods, feeling once again extremely sorry for himself.  
  
When he returned again, Onni was sitting in the door of the tent, tuning his kantele. Emil had seen him a few times in the week prior, finally accepting that it might be good to seek some help when working too hard made his rib twinge, making use of the kantele he was still carrying for gentle invocations of relief and healing. When Lalli herded Emil over, he felt kind of bad. Onni had held out so long on using magic to fix his soreness, and now he was totally willing to help out with this, despite it being completely self-inflicted.  
  
He still crawled back into the tent and accepted it, even more readily once the spell had been repeated for a few rounds and he began to feel a light fuzz in his mind. It was a bit like the light lift of just starting to become drunk, and while he still felt a great aversion to moving much, the pain in his torso felt distant. He didn't know magic could do this too. It did make sense, after the way he'd seen people in Keuruu visiting a mage for all manner of illness, but he hadn't yet experienced it himself. He found himself lying down with his head near Onni's knee, and saw that Lalli was still squatting attentively in the snow, watching his cousin work. Emil's out-of-focus eyes drifted to his face, which he seemed to take as a signal to stand up.  
  
"I'm going to check the perimeter. Keep the rifle." Handing it to Onni as if he was leaving him alone, he sprung up and ran off.  
  
Late the next morning, Emil felt well enough to move. He expected some annoyance for holding them up so long, when keeping moving was one of their few defences. Nobody mentioned anything, though. At least it was getting truly cold. Emil wasn't sure how he felt about it. By Lalli's prediction, they would be home before the absolute coldest part of the winter hit, and the cover of the slowly-thickening snow was probably saving them from a lot of troll activity. Still, it was clearly freezing all the time now, and if it was anything like Finland then the temperature drop as January progressed would be sharp. They were surviving, but it was getting harder and harder to not feel constantly cold with their meager food supply.  
  
The days once again fell into a routine of walking, scavenging, hunting, camping. Lalli continued to assure them that only a little further to the west, the huge lake was waiting for them to meet its shores. Thoughts of what he would do when he arrived home started to occupy him more and more. He was becoming keenly aware that back in Keuruu, he had left a lot unfinished, most notably a story about spending the winter in limbo.


	22. Chapter 22

Lalli was alive, and Onni was alive, and the gods whispered welcomes to both of them as they made their slow, sure way back north and west.  
  
The snow was slowly deepening, and in a few weeks it would be too much to walk through with any speed. Lalli had hope, though. Their pace had been good, and he felt some of his strength coming back. As they made their way north, the forest had thickened. Further to the south, some of its growth had looked very young, with some areas being barely wooded at all. Now, the trees grew as Lalli was used to seeing them at home.  
  
"We're near the lake, aren't we?" Emil asked, returning from yet another village store. There had been no further incidents with the tinned food, probably partly due to the fact that Lalli's night snares had become more adept as time went on. They were about to become even more so, because by way of explanation for his statement Emil was holding out some little packets that appeared to be full of fishing gear. "Maybe we can fish!" He was very excited by the prospect of a new kind of fresh food. Lalli remembered a dream he'd had many weeks ago now, in a far worse state, and smiled to himself as he took the lines and hooks.  
  
Lalli had always been at home finding food in the woods, but had spent most of his life as an active hunter rather than a trapper. His first snares had caught mostly small beasts rather than anything he wanted to bring back to camp, and he'd considered giving up the tactic. After one very good hare, though, he'd worked at it with renewed vigour, taking any string that could be foraged or made out of the dead stems and grasses that persisted in the snow. It certainly saved time when it did work, although accidentally catching things he'd rather avoid remained a problem.  
  
His eye caught the tiniest point of red in the thick whiteness covering the ground. Some of last year's lingonberries had still been sitting on the bush when the snow came down, just as they did at home. Digging into the snow with one hand, he found a branch in the lightly packed snow and picked a few off it. They were unlikely to taste very good at this point, but they served the purpose of making something much less likely to catch a troll or beast. The thin wire went through even berries this tiny with ease, and Lalli knotted it around them to make sure they couldn't be ingested without taking in some of the wire, ending up with a slender line dotted at even points with the bait.  
  
Emil was watching him with interest. "I think Viivi made a necklace like that last autumn, too." The fact he was actually able to tease Lalli was such a change from the awkward resentment and simmering grief of the first two weeks. Even after that, the spun-glass treatment had persisted for a little while. Now, this was nice. Still, Lalli put on his most unimpressed tone to reply.  
  
"Hilarious. Let's see if something likes this better than pine needles." Indeed, something did, a big male wood grouse. It looked decidedly miserable when Lalli found it the next morning with so much wire down its throat it couldn't escape. He whispered a thanks to both it and the forest gods for this amazing catch as he adeptly snapped its neck, then returned to present the meaty bird to Onni and Emil. The obvious glee they felt at his good work was very satisfying. Removing a few feathers and deftly slitting it open, he dragged the guts and windpipe out of it, stuffed a few handfuls of snow into the cavity he'd left, and slung the body over his shoulder for the day's walk.  
  
They had indeed been near the shores of the lake when Emil had found the fishing line, and today they finally reached it. Ice was forming on the edges of the lake, but from the shore they could see that the vast stretch of the water was still mostly liquid. Even in the afternoon light, they couldn't make out any detail of the other shore. It made the wideness of parts of Saimaa look cramped, the breadth of sky reflected in it slightly breathtaking after weeks and weeks of forest. It also wasn't good for ice fishing quite yet, and Lalli voiced his disappointment.  
  
Still, they had their grouse, and in the evening they eagerly awaited their fire burning down enough to cultivate a section of coals that would cook it well. Onni happily worked away as the fire matured, plucking the richly coloured feathers and making little cuts to poke in some of the little packet of salt Emil had optimistically recovered. Despite the fact that they were deep in the Silent World and still had to be wary of so much - beasts, wolves, their own vulnerability to the cold - for one evening they ate well, and that was good.  
  
They followed the edge of the lake the next day. While there had been many villages around it, none of them had been very large, nor did they usually go right up to the water's edge. It was nice to be near open water again. While the land they'd traveled on the way home had in many ways seemed familiar, the lack of lakes had been strange and a little depressing. Even if Lalli hated to actually travel on the water, he felt quite strongly that a landscape without it was somehow unbalanced. It started to feel like they would really see Finland again, and soon.  
  
The feeling of being close to home was even more enhanced when the evening led to a wonderful discovery. They had come across a small home that neither he nor Onni felt contained any trolls. When they approached the small wooden house to appraise it as a source of shelter and supplies, it was in surprisingly good repair, with the door needing little effort to open and a pile of wood remaining near the fireplace inside. Lalli had appraised the place and, before they committed to settling in and lighting the fire, decided to briefly also check inside the building near it. Once he'd seen what it was, he ran back inside and burst in at a speed that made Onni start and lunge for the rifle.  
  
"No. No need. Good news." Onni picked up the gun to follow at a much calmer pace, but remained confused as Lalli led the two of them towards the other building, excited to have found them yet another great thing. When Onni realised that the building was in fact exactly what it looked like, his eyebrows shot up and his eyes shone.  
  
"They have a sauna!"  
  
"And a wood pile still there and ready." Lalli and Onni had a rare moment of unrestrained glee together, while Emil slumped against the entrance of the sauna's unusually well-furnished rest area, looking like he was having beautiful visions. "I can wash my hair. The gods are real and they love us."  
  
The work of starting the fire and sweeping the sauna clean enough to use proceeded in near silence. It was a slightly odd sauna, for sure. Whoever had owned it had seen fit to keep a chipped tea set and a dusty, decaying couch in the outer room where one would usually just hang clothes and towels. It wasn't as close to the lake as it could have been, but with the way Lalli ran, it was close enough. Once the dust was swept, Emil lay on the top shelf of the actual sauna part as it heated up, still in some of his clothes, groaning in joy already at how warm the room was getting.  
  
When the fire had made the stones piping hot and they'd heaped enough snow in a bucket to last them a little while, they all stripped and sat on the top bench, tossing snow onto the stones and watching it vaporise nearly instantly to soak them in steam. Lalli waited until he'd gotten just warm enough, then made his move.  
  
"I'll be right back." He always felt kind of bad about the fact that non-immune people were deprived of swimming in lakes. Onni always just shrugged it off. He hadn't ever gotten used enough to it to miss it like Lalli would. He'd removed his breath mask for this, the first time in weeks, although the rifle remained propped up right outside the door of the steam room, ready to grab if they should be ambushed. At least the walls of this building were made of solid wood, and being in the sauna didn't make them any less able to detect things coming. Feeling sure enough that the situation was under control, Lalli was off, trailing steam behind him as he entered the cold night air.  
  
Sprinting to the lake, he approached the edge of the growing ice at full speed and executed a neat dive, plunging into the freezing water. At first, the magic deep heat of the sauna protected him, the water feeling nothing but pleasantly cool, but as he surfaced his breath felt like it was slicing its way into him. He flicked his hair back and gasped at the cold, swimming back and hauling himself out onto the edge of ice, skidding as he ran back led by moonlight, starlight and the faint glow of the lamp on the sauna door. Slowing to a walk, he entered the rest area, opened the door of the steam room just enough to slip in, and drew the door shut behind him as he moved to flop back down on the top shelf. Emil and Onni were spread out enough for all their thighs to touch as the three men relaxed.  
  
"Throw more." Lalli said, and Onni obliged with another generous ladleful on the rocks. The ice water on his skin turning to steam and then sweat was one of the most glorious sensations he'd ever experienced. He leaned back against the sap-encrusted wooden walls, feeling his skin purge itself of over two months of filth. Onni and Emil looked like they were about as happy as he was. Emil was ladling the rapidly melting snow out of the bucket and over his head, massaging his scalp to free up the filth. Onni just sat there in a daze of warmth. "Emil, why didn't you raid another liquor store on the way here?"  
  
Emil glanced over at Onni, pausing for a moment in his blissful hair-washing. "I think it would be a very, very bad idea to get drunk out here."  
  
Onni just sighed deeply, seemingly very resentful of the fact. He threw on more water and relaxed back against the wood himself, rolling the palms on his hands against himself to work off the dead skin. When they went to the snow, all three went together, Lalli exiting first with lamp and rifle to be very sure nothing was waiting for them. After all briefly diving into the snow to cool off, they retreated back to the steam. Onni noticed a pile of assorted cloths in a corner and improvised, tying them together and dipping them in the bucket to give them some weight. It didn't have anything like the sensation and scent that made a summer birch bundle truly enjoyable, but Lalli could still feel the effect Onni smacking him on the back was having on his travel-worn muscles. All three did the favour for each other, working out weeks of knots with the heat and pressure.  
  
After they'd used the sauna for long enough that they all felt truly purged of their filth, they left the door of the steam room open, flooding the rest area with heat. The building would cool a lot by morning, but they wouldn't have to sleep in all their clothes tonight. The relative luxury was enough to leave them all extremely cheerful. Emil was sprawled against the wall, letting himself steam dry, fluffing his hair lightly at intervals to give it some life. Onni was very pink, drying his hair with his shirt, singing to himself as he rubbed at the top of his head. His old, broad Saimaa accent always came through on this one, a simple tune he'd sung at times like this for as long as Lalli could remember.  
  
_"Kunne ajat, kunne ajat? Sinä ajat, minä ajan..."_  
  
Lalli joined in for _"Sinä Petroskoil, minä Petroskoil"_ , lightly harmonising with Onni's voice. His cousin looked over at him as he did so, catching his eye for the moment of their voices bonding. He looked happy for a moment, before pausing as if noticing something was strange. He reached over to his steamed-up breath mask and returned it to his face, sighing and no longer bothering to sing through the mask's muffling as he put most of his clothes back on. Luckily, they'd brought all their things in here already, and there was no need to open the door any more tonight.


	23. Chapter 23

Onni flopped down on the sofa and enjoyed being perfectly warm for the first time in many weeks. The lamp they'd found was burning low now that they no longer needed it to spot danger in the snow. It was enough for Onni to see by, but Emil stumbled around a little locating the clothes he wanted to put on to sleep. The warmth of the sauna fire had spread very well into the area they'd decided to spend the night, and the stones would keep giving off heat even after the fire was gone. There would be enough residual heat for them to wake up almost comfortable, but it would still chill a lot. Despite still feeling the deep post-sauna sweat, Onni had already put on his second layer of socks in anticipation.  
  
Emil's foot caught the kantele Onni had stashed in the corner, and it rang out in a way that was clearly a bit out of tune. Onni made an effort to keep it ready, but the change in temperature during the evening had warped it a little. He picked it up and began to fix the problem.  
  
"Are you going to play something?" Emil asked, looking interested. He'd always watched Onni's kantele playing with fascination, seemingly unsure every time if there was going to be magic. It was always a little entertaining watching him try to contain the wide-eyed questions.  
  
"No. Just making sure it's ready to play, if I need to." Onni fished the little key out of his pocket and fit it to one peg, twisting it a fraction and twanging the string until it sounded right.  
  
"I could." Lalli was sitting with his back against the wall, still in his underwear and looking content. Onni finished tuning the kantele and handed it to him, then stretched out on the couch. He planned on giving up the nice spot eventually to the two people willing to share it more closely, but for now Lalli was busy starting to pluck the strings in sequence, waiting for his hands to warm up and remember the tunes he'd learned. He was never so keen a player as Onni, nor so much the type to sit down and cast a spell with such a bulky instrument as an aid. Still, of course he'd learned, first from their grandmother and then a little more from Onni.  
  
It was nice to see him actually enjoying it. Emil stopped clunking around and sat down beside Lalli, again fascinated by the pass of fingers over strings. Through the murky silence, the kind Onni felt must be particular to lamplit cabins in a frozen forest, the kantele's delicate rainfall tones were beautifully clear. He closed his eyes and started to again just enjoy the warmth and the gentle noise.  
  
Lalli first plucked and pressed down light-fingered chords almost at random, then started picking tiny sections out of themes Onni recognised and repeating them over and over. His experimentation finally settled into a steady little tune, then he started to hum, following the notes he was playing. It brought home how little time they'd spent together in Lalli's later teens, noticing how much his voice had settled into the range he now had. When Onni had first tried to teach him, his voice had been as light and high as a bird's, and he'd watched Onni demonstrate how to play and sing with eyes far too big for his quiet face. The last time Onni had known well what songs his cousin remembered, he was singing in a mess of cracks and missed notes. His voice was still soft, but had grown into a shaky baritone which the kantele sounded past like the warble of small rapids.  
  
Onni cracked an eye open as he heard someone move. Emil was lying down on the floor, piling up his coat and boots to rest his elbows and chin on as he lay entranced by the motion. Onni closed his eye again as Lalli started to sing.  
  
_"Kun mun kultani tulisi,_  
_Armahani asteleisi,_  
_Tuntisin ma tuon tulosta,_  
_Arvoaisin astunnasta,_  
_Jos ois vielä virstan päässä,_  
_Tahikka kahen takana."_  
  
He recognised the choice, and it surprised him. As far as he'd ever known, Lalli had always concentrated on learning the songs that would serve him in magic. Of course, this one was well known, and he'd have heard it as often as any other popular verses from the _Kanteletar_. He just couldn't really place when Lalli would have started paying attention to the words of any love songs like this one.  
  
_"Utuna ulos menisin,_  
_Savuna pihalle saisin,_  
_Kipunoina kiiättäisin,_  
_Liekkinä lehauttaisin-"_  
  
Onni quietly rolled over and faced the back of the couch. The sudden feeling of someone he'd helped raise surprising him, and with this specific kind of new awareness, left him feeling a way that was a little hard to process right now. Lalli's song continued, repeating the odd pair of lines to suit the tune he'd picked out.  
  
_"Suu on rasvasta sulasta,_  
_Huulet kuin hunajameestä,_  
_Käet kultaiset, koriat,_  
_Kaula kuin kanervan varsi..."_  
  
He opted to pretend he was asleep when Lalli's voice and playing finally died. It fooled Emil well enough. "Oh. I think you put Onni to sleep." The silence moved in for a moment, then was broken again. "Was that a spell?"  
  
"No. Just a song." Lalli didn't specify what about.  
  
"I still never really understand what's going on when you sing those ones full of really old words."  
  
"Mmm, I know. We should sleep."  
  
"It was pretty, though. Thank you." A real softness crept into Emil's voice now that he thought Onni wasn't listening. He couldn't totally have missed the meaning of the song he'd just been shown. The idea that sitting next to Emil had made Lalli think of this traditional verse, over all the many others he'd been taught, was another thing that brought on hard-to-categorise feelings.  
  
Lalli just shuffled around, finding his clothes. Further shuffling was heard as the two of them made some pile of things and lay down on the floor together. Onni did feel slightly bad for not giving them the couch, given they were almost certainly wrapped together anyway down on the floor, but it wasn't for long. Soon he was actually drifting off into the heaviest sleep he'd had in a while.  
  
He sat up in the grass. The perpetual summer light of his dream space was in one of its midnight phases, turning everything to soft peach tones. It was just as peaceful as the scene he'd left in the waking world, and he stood up to walk down to the shore and gaze out. It was still necessary to be vigilant, even though right now they seemed far from any former large town or nest of spiritual disease. The lake they were near in the waking world did contain its share of trolls, although thankfully they seemed to sleep even before the ice properly came.  
  
As he watched the familiarly strange horizon - an activity that stretched out for what seemed like a lot of the timeless time of the dream world - he noticed a slight movement. When he focused on it, a voice started to become clear. He started. It was a person pressed against the edge of his space, banging their fist and wailing his name. She looked vaguely familiar, and was wearing an outfit similar to that of any mage at work. Once she noticed that she had actually caught his eye, she waved and yelled again. "Let me in!"  
  
Onni felt some suspicion. He couldn't quite place this woman, short and generally diminutive with a voice to match. With her tiny stature, no wonder it had taken him a while to notice her. "State your name."  
  
"It's me! Sanna! I moved to Keuruu last summer, remember, you've _seen_ me working with Lalli!" She banged on the barrier again with her fist. "I've been trying to talk to you for _weeks_ , you useless -"  
  
She fell into the water as Onni let her in, splashing as she swum and waded towards him. The expression on her face when she tried to wring out her soaked fur hood was not very pleased, but before Onni could get an apology in she looked up at him from her tiny height, caught herself and started to stammer. "Uh, um, I'm sorry I called you useless, I've just been trying for um, a while, and it was the heat of the moment, and I'm..."  
  
Onni held up a hand to silence her. He finally recognised her, the painfully anxious woman that had started relieving Lalli of a few of the tedious sheep-related duties immune mages in Keuruu were often bothered into. Normally, he tried to keep track of anyone that might be called Lalli's friend, but the side duties of people back in Keuruu had been very far from his mind for over a month now.  
  
"It's okay. Tell me why you're here."  
  
"Nobody knows what's happened to you?" She said it like it should be obvious what the problem was. Now that Onni thought about it, that did make sense. All he had to offer at first was "Oh."  
  
There was an awkward silence. She continued twisting at her hood.  
  
"So um... what _has_ happened to you? It's just, um, not to put pressure on or anything, but Emil left a note saying you'd be back in a week, and this is just a little longer than a week."  
  
Onni wondered where to start. "We thought we were going to St. Petersburg, but we actually needed to go to Moscow to find him."  
  
"I don't think I know where that is... Wait, to find Lalli?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"He was in danger." Had Emil really not specified anything about this in his note? "Why did you think we left?"  
  
"Um, honestly none of us were sure. I mean, we assumed _you_ thought he needed something, but um..." Onni made a mental note to have a word with Emil when he woke up.  
  
Sanna's eyes widened in panic as she processed the situation. "Wait, so he _was_ , do you mean you found him, or that he's...?"  
  
"He's alive."  
  
She exhaled with relief. "Okay. Lalli's alive. You're alive. Is Emil...?"  
  
"Yes, alive."  
  
Something was tugging at Onni, a sign that the waking world required his attention. He felt his vision start to blur as his own self began to feel light, ready to travel between realms. "Look, we are on our way home, you can tell people that."  
  
"How long -" The end of the sentence never reached him as his dream space wrapped itself up into the smallest of bright spots, swirling into an ever-tinier space until it was no longer in existence at all.  
  
Onni was jerked into wakefulness, the room still dark despite a very faint grey light being visible through the one tiny window. Lalli was scrambling up, not even bothering to put his boots on before grabbing the gun by the door. "Lalli? What's the matter?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation note:
> 
> The song Lalli is singing there is "Kun mun kultani tulisi", it has many versions but I like the one Tallari do. Onni is right that it's from the Kanteletar, a volume of poems that is considered a "sister volume" to the Kalevala, Finland's national epic. "Kanteletar" is a bit hard to translate in one word, but the -tar suffix is used to imply a sort of noble femaleness - "kuningas" ("king") becomes "kuningatar" (queen), "kuu" (moon) becomes the "Kuutar" Lalli calls to in his cloud-shifting spell, etc. "Kanteletar" could be seen as the sort of kantele muse. 
> 
> I've done my best to present a good translation - here is the whole thing rather than just the excerpts I put in there. I had to refer to translations made by people who actually speak Finnish natively for some parts, but also went back to the original to see how to reword much of it. I think the rewording mostly preserves the imagery without retaining too much of the clunkiness of a totally literal translation. It's not great - I had to guess at the meaning of some words because they're not in standard dictionaries anymore - but it gets the idea across! I was thinking of the first part when I wrote the subway "no, it's actually us" scene.
> 
> "If my sweetheart would come,  
> I could hear his footfall  
> And know him.  
> His pace announces him,  
> even a verst away,  
> or maybe two. 
> 
> I would float out like mist,  
> like smoke over the garden.  
> I would flash like a spark,  
> with the glow of flame.  
> Beside the wild wort,  
> I would press his mouth to mine.
> 
> I would surely take his hand,  
> though a snake lay in his palm.  
> I would bring a kiss to his lips  
> even through a vicious doom,  
> draping round his neck  
> despite death hiding there.  
> I would come to his side,  
> though that side were bloody.
> 
> My love holds no such dangers,  
> there is no blood on his mouth.  
> No ooze of snakes on his hands,  
> no deathly thing infects him.  
> His mouth melts like butter,  
> with lips of honey nectar,  
> his touch is gilded beauty,  
> neck like a stem of heather."


	24. Chapter 24

Emil slept peacefully. He and Lalli had lain their coats out on the floor next to each other and even been able to arrange their boots into some kind of headrest last night, enjoying the way they could wind their bodies together now that Onni was sleeping away from them on the couch. Of course, it had been more than a little frustrating that Onni was still only a couple of meters away and probably not nearly a heavy enough sleeper for them to try anything. Neither of them had been alone at all for weeks, much less alone together. For most of the expedition, there had been enough to distract them, but a moment of comfort did make some things feel more urgent.  
  
Lalli's hand had silently slid down the back of Emil's pants for a moment, squeezing a cheek briefly but firmly, before he'd curled his arms around his back. He must have known it was immensely frustrating, getting that brief reminder of what they'd been missing for the past couple of months. The little smile Emil could feel Lalli's face forming was a sure sign of being slightly smug about doing this to him, and he retaliated by quickly nuzzling into Lalli's neck and nipping at the skin there. Lalli tensed, gritting his teeth and pushing Emil's face away before it could goad him into any noise.  
  
At least the way Lalli felt as he pressed back against him, sighing in frustration just a little as he buried his face in Emil's shoulder and gripped the back of his shirt, promised a lot for when they could finally be alone together. Emil fell asleep with his mind turning over how many days it might be before that was, deeply resenting the fact that leaving Onni by himself would be inarguably wrong to do out here.  
  
The first thing he felt in the morning was Lalli jerking awake, breaking the grip of Emil's arms around him and scrambling up. Lalli was grabbing his gun and pointing it at the opening edge of the door, already tense as a spring before even putting his coat or boots on.  
  
"Lalli? What's the matter?" Onni sounded quite disoriented as he started to wake. It was still very dark in here. The sun couldn't have risen properly yet, and the scene in front of him was murky. His question was answered when a voice came from the other side of the door, speaking some language Emil was very sure he'd never heard before. He sat up abruptly. While the language was unfamiliar, the voice was unambiguously human, and the first other than Onni's and Lalli's he'd heard since leaving Saimaa. The fact that there might be another human out here worked through the cogs of his sleepy brain, finally registering as very surprising.  
  
The door cracked open, and Lalli shouted "Watch out!", poking the barrel of the rifle through the gap. Whoever was on the other side of the door yelled something and attempted to quickly jam it shut again, but the wood just sounded dully against the metal. The door swung open as it rebounded. Faint early morning light and cold flooded in to reveal a man standing, staring Lalli down as he settled his own gun against his shoulder. He and Lalli both tensed as they appraised each other. Neither seemed ready to shoot, but both had a weapon pointed at them and were not about to put their own down.  
  
He looked very slightly younger than Emil and Lalli, wearing a hat in the same style that Onni always made them, fur with earflaps. His coat was fur too, with firm-looking broad buttons on the front. The few locks of hair that were visible from under his hat were straw-blond, and his angular cheeks were lightly pink with the cold. He was wearing strange boots that looked more like pressed wool than any kind of skin, which went almost to his knees. The most pertinent part of him, the gun, had a knife attached to the front. It seemed like it could well do faster damage than Lalli's rifle, looking almost exactly like the assault weapon Emil remembered coming with them on their old expedition. That one had sometimes not been perfectly accurate, but it had always been effective.  
  
He backed away one step, addressing Lalli again in a long string of incomprehensible words. Onni tried to move to stand, which seemed to surprise the man. The room was still so dark he couldn't easily work out how many people were in there. If Emil had known how to pray, he might have prayed now that whoever this man was, he didn't overreact to being surprised. As he swung his gun slightly towards the movement, Onni quickly put up his hands and Lalli twitched.  
  
"Don't move." Lalli's voice was shaky.  
  
_"Я  тебя не понимаю."_ The man was raising his voice. That and his tense stance made him seem like he was quite angry. Keeping his hands up, Onni slowly stood. "I don't think he speaks Finnish, Lalli."  
  
Lalli just kept his eyes on his target. Onni addressed the man in Icelandic. All he got in return was a very slight glance in his direction before the man's attention returned to the gun pointed at him. Emil was standing up too, now, and slowly making his way into view of the door, with loud steps and hands pre-emptively raised. "Lalli, I think he wants you to put the gun down."  
  
"Him first. His is bigger." Emil wasn't sure how he was going to communicate that, especially given that despite Lalli being clearly able to shoot people less fast, it likely didn't matter to a lone person being shot at.  
  
Emil spoke to the stranger, in a tone similar to the one someone might use when hoping a very large dog was friendly. "Okay. Okay. Guns down. On the count of three. Do you understand? Three, two, one" - he illustrated by counting down on his fingers - "then _down_." He pressed his hands down on the air. "Yes?"  
  
There was no response. Emil demonstrated his plan again, doing the same motions, slowly moving closer to Lalli's side. The fur-hatted man was flicking his gaze between Emil and Lalli very intently. When Emil said "Okay, now. This time. Lalli, nod that you're doing it, so he knows you're agreeing.". Lalli glanced towards Emil for a second, nodding, then looked back at the other man, nodding again. Perhaps it had been understood. "Three, two, one..."  
  
In line with Emil's hand motion, the barrels of both guns tentatively dipped, then fell as both men realised the other was putting down his weapon. The deep breath everyone finally took was audible, but it was still tense as the parties inside and outside the building regarded each other.  
  
  
  
"Maybe both of you should put your guns down." Lalli followed the suggestion, the stranger appeasingly mirroring his movement as he slowly placed it on the floor. The two of them stepped away from their weapons a little and both looked at Emil. With the immediate issue resolved, Emil turned to Lalli. "Um, am I missing something? Is there a reason you thought you needed a gun?" He wasn't sure how Lalli was able to tell the difference between people and trolls, but he was still quite sure that he could.  
  
"I didn't think he would actually be a human! Nobody lives here!"  
  
The evidence against that statement was literally staring them in the face, blinking in bewilderment at the exchange going on in front of him. He didn't appear to comprehend Finnish at all, and Onni's attempt at Icelandic had failed too. Whatever language he was speaking certainly wasn't Norwegian, Danish or Swedish, either. Emil's time at school may have been disastrous and left a lot forgotten, but he was very sure he'd never learned of any other languages existing in the Known World.  
  
"The skalds are going to lose their minds if we ever make it home."  
  
Lalli looked sideways at him. "What?"  
  
"He doesn't speak any language in the Known World!" With the guns safely down and nobody moving to pick them up again, the meaning of this encounter was starting to sink in.  
  
Onni chipped in. "Indeed fascinating, but no good for us right now. What are we going to do with him?"  
  
Emil thought for a moment, then stepped past Lalli to lean out the door, tapping himself in the middle of the chest and attempting a friendly smile. "Emil." He just got a blank look, which segued into dawning understanding as he tapped Lalli on the shoulder and said "Lalli", then pointed at Onni and said his name too.  
  
The man poked himself in the chest, mimicking Emil's motion. "Vasiliy." It was a start.


	25. Chapter 25

  
  
THE ISLAND SETTLEMENTS OF NORTHERN LADOGA  
  
Poklonniy Krest (pop. 200)  
  
Valaam (pop. 600)  
  
Mantiansaari (pop. 75)  
  
  
******  
  
  
Vasya had been trekking through the winter night on one of his usual surveying trips, enjoying the quiet that always came on once the real cold started to settle in. He'd spent as much of his 19 years as possible out in these woods, and the steady crunch of snow under his feet was all he heard. The light shifting of his great-grandfather's gun on his back served to assure him that even if some troll or beast still roamed at this time of year, he'd be back safe and sound the next morning. He hadn't seen anything large enough to merit more than the quieter bayonet treatment in almost two months, though. This was likely to be an uneventful trip.

Pausing by the shore of the lake, he remembered that there was an outpost here. A few of the old dachas and cabins that dotted the edge of this lake were always kept repaired and stocked with a few essentials for surveyors like himself. It was a blessing if they'd suffered some injury or otherwise needed to rest in their long treks through the forest, but there was always the danger of trolls trying to move into them. He had checked here recently, but it was always good to be sure. The sun was finally starting to rise, and he could make it his final task before heading back. Getting back behind the Mantiansaari boundary and into bed sounded very good.

Approaching the house, something seemed off. There were footprints in the snow all around the place, despite him being sure no other person would have been here in some weeks. They looked like human footprints, but then, trolls came in all shapes. He slowed down and crouched a little as he approached the house. No movement inside from a glance, and no movement again when he carefully edged open the slightly-ajar door. On inspection, nothing was amiss at all besides a depleted woodpile. Had some other surveyor been here?

He didn't know why it took him so long to notice that the footprints also lead towards the banya, but there they were, telling a story in the snow for him to read. The way the snow was churned up outside the door looked very familiar, and it looked like some light-footed person with a wide stride had bound off towards the lake at some point. Vasya was deeply confused. He was very sure he knew of no group of people on any of the islands here who would come out into the dangerous woods just to use a decaying banya. Surely, there was no shortage of them in the settlements. Perhaps they'd gone mad.

They appeared to in fact be completely mad. When Vasya cracked the door open, he was greeted with _"Varo!"_ and the barrel of a rifle. He was barely able to get the gun off his own back and into his hands before the door swung open to reveal a skinny, silvery-haired man who looked bent on murder. The immense shock of seeing another person point a gun at him was enough to make Vasya fumble, but the strange man didn't take the opening and shoot, instead staring at him as if he expected some response.

"Whoa! Hey, look, I don't know who you are or what that meant, but we don't need to go waving guns around! Look, no trolls here!" The stranger was still pointing a rifle at him, so Vasya kept his weapon up, trying to back away as he wondered what this wild-eyed, half-dressed person was doing here. Behind him, another man was moving. He looked like the wild gunman but bigger, and Vasya twitched towards him for a moment before seeing that he didn't appear to be trying to attack. His hands were up. That was good.

_"Älä liiku!"_

This wiry little man was clearly very angry and bizarrely unwilling to speak Russian. Vasya had heard other languages, and was vaguely aware that there were a few strange ones out there in the world. Growing up on the lake, he’d known a few families that kept up an old local language of this area. They all spoke Russian to him, though, as they did to anyone from outside such tiny groups of relatives. Vasya had never encountered someone who flat-out refused to do that, nor any idea why someone would. He had no framework for resolving this situation at all.

Vasya raised his voice, trying to be as clear as possible about the problem. "I don't understand you." The bigger man was talking first to his small angry companion, then to Vasya, again in nothing he recognised. He just tried to keep his eye on the person pointing a gun at him, hoping nothing he was doing would set off behaviour that was more dangerous than the weird way he was already acting. He neither wanted to get shot nor find out what shooting another person was like, and couldn't actually decide which he dreaded more. Of course, he'd always been a good hunter and helped defend the islands from trolls and beasts, but pulling the trigger now would be something else entirely. The angry face in front of him was still a human face.

There was another person emerging from the darkness with hands up, and he spoke, still not in anything like Russian, gesturing in the air. This third person had a wound on his face that was healing, but not actually yet healed, still a danger to him if he was out here and non-immune. Vasya couldn't begin to guess where on earth these three would have come from, nor what their situation in life must be if they were walking around like that and sleeping in random banyas. If they were not indeed complete madmen, there must be some purpose to them being out here.

The newest man was repeating his gesturing. His tone was definitely that of someone trying to calm everyone down. The fact he was clearly trying to communicate made it finally occur to Vasya that maybe these three men somehow didn't speak Russian at all. He thought he caught the meaning of the last man's counting and pressed down hands, as well as him seeking agreement from the unfriendly one. Guns down. This was good. Hesitantly, he complied with the request, and luckily the first man recognised the voice of reason as well. It was a great relief when he put his gun all the way down to the ground, and Vasya tried to mirror him exactly to show that he'd been on board with the "less guns" plan from the beginning.

All three of them started discussing something in their weird language. Not a word of it was intelligible, so Vasya just stood there, wondering what on earth he was meant to do. Nobody was attempting any further aggression. Perhaps they'd thought he was a troll, and him putting his gun up had just made it worse, and this was fundamentally a misunderstanding. They’d responded pretty quickly to whatever the last one had said. Still, they had just pointed a gun at him. That small angry one was not leaving his sight until they all parted.

The reasonable one was talking again, poking himself in the chest. _"Emil."_ The first word was followed by two others, with indications of the other two people. _"Lalli. Onni."_ Right, names. "Emil" was smiling at him, again clearly trying his best to be friendly despite the terrible introduction they'd had. Well, it wouldn’t do any harm to at least return the introduction.

"Vasiliy." He poked himself in the chest in the way Emil had, returning the motion but not yet the smile or any attempt at familiarity. After that, he wasn't sure what else to do. He had been so sure that everyone spoke Russian. Wasn't it taught everywhere, even before the Rash? Although he knew full well he wasn't the best authority on what happened in the far corners of the world, this was something he had definitely always thought he knew.

Evidence to the contrary was standing in the door of a backwoods banya, looking at him with as much awkwardness as he felt himself. Now that Emil had proved himself to be the least mad of these three strangers, the wound on his face was even more bothersome. Perhaps he was immune, but if he wasn't, he should be moved to a more sensible place right away. None of them were blatantly infected, so there was a chance that somewhere in the barrier zone people would be willing to set up a shelter while they worked out what was going on.

"Um, I think you should all come with me." They all looked at him blankly. He tried again with some hand gestures involved. "You" - he gestured at them, aware he looked a bit silly but a bit too tired out by all this to care - "come with me" - he gestured to himself, then vaguely north - "we have food. Food?"

More blank looks. He mimed eating, the awareness of looking kind of silly still present. Emil perked up and said something to Onni, who also looked very interested in the idea. Lalli was still staring at him in a way that seemed unfriendly, but was at least nodding.

"Maybe we can find someone who understands you." They clearly still didn't know what he meant at all, so he just repeated the "come with" gesture with a questioning look. Onni held up a hand and began to pick up his things, only to pause when addressed by Lalli with a question. Whatever it was, the answer was combined with shrugging and a gesturing at Vasya, and if the short back-and-forth that ensued was an argument, it was won pretty quickly by Emil and Onni. They finished gathering everything, and Vasya noticed the sun was actually starting to rise properly now. They would have some decent light for the walk back.  
  
Lalli put his gun on his back when he picked it up. Vasya opted not to copy him this time. They didn’t seem greatly suspicious of the gun still being out when he started to lead the way, and he picked his way along the paths he knew would take him home fastest, glancing back often to make sure all three of them were still following him and not pulling their weapon out again. The path he took was narrow in places, but they all seemed pretty capable of keeping up with the way he ducked through the forest. He was still wondering where they'd come from, how long they'd been out here, and why they would sleep where they did when there was a well-known settlement so near by.

They were mostly silent, but occasionally chatting interrupted the crunch of many boots on snow. Maybe they were outcasts from wherever they'd come from, and Vasya should be more afraid of them. They really didn't seem aggressive now, and he would really like to assume it had all been a mistake before. He could just hear the lecture his grandma would give him at that thought, though. _Vasenka, you trust too easily_.  
  
If they tried anything weird nearer the village, at least shooting them was still an option. If it came down to it, everyone’s safety, he could be tough enough, right? He remembered the one time he’d seen someone die from being shot, a terrible troll hunting accident from a few years ago, and really hoped they wouldn’t try anything weird. To think he’d assumed this would be an uneventful night and already started dreaming of his bed. Grandma would have had something to say about that too. _If you want to make the gods laugh, tell them your plans._

The discussion slowly petered out as the sun climbed properly above the horizon, then began to near the highest point it would reach today. Emil tried to talk to him again, asking _“Svenska?”_ before babbling more nonsense. It still rang no bells at all, and Lalli snorted at his shrug and “I tried” expression. While it wasn’t helpful, it was still certainly friendly. Finally, they began to see the carved idols that guarded the far eastern edge of the Ladoga settlements.  
  
Vasya had to pause when Onni stopped to regard them with great interest, approaching them and leaning close but not touching. The fact Onni carried a gusli on his back rather than a weapon had made Vasya wonder about his purpose in their party, and his close contemplation of the image of Perun in the old trunk seemed like more evidence towards his vague guess about magic. He was looking at it as though he'd never seen one before. They must have come from far away indeed. Still, he was clearly aware of its power, backing away so as not to break his watch on it for some distance before he turned back onto the path. He and Lalli ended up in an intense discussion as they closed the final distance to the edge of the settlement.  
  
They had reached the point in the trees just before the clear area. From this point, they’d be able to see where they were all heading. If they weren’t aware of where everyone lived yet, maybe it was wise to keep it that way until he heard otherwise. “You all have to wait here.” The looks they were giving him were blank, so he tried again with accompanying hand gestures. It felt a bit like trying to communicate with a poorly trained dog. He thought he’d got it across, but then they started to follow him again as he moved off himself. “No!” They stopped. “Stay.”  
  
This time, Onni pointed at the ground with a quizzical look. “Yes! There! Wait until I get back.” They started settling in. He thought they'd got the message. It seemed like a flaw in his plan to leave them totally unsupervised, but if they were gone when he returned, at least everyone would have been warned of the strangers likely to emerge from the forest. The first item on his list of things to do was to tell everyone to be on their guard. He ran off, breaking into the clear zone and crossing it within a few minutes, then starting to make his way across the snow-covered fields of the Mantiansaari farms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So many thanks to ji_tera for consulting so much on this chapter, I owe you some fic or knit socks or something! Thanks also to my real-life-not-on-Ao3 friend Jari for drawing the map. I owe you many sauna beers. 
> 
> A fun linguistic note: the god in the idol, Perun, is related to the Baltic thunder god Perkunas. This is also commonly taken to be the origin of the Finnish "perkele". Onni and Lalli won't think of that if they ever learn his name, though, because if you don't know the intermediate steps that link the two "Perun" just sounds almost exactly like the Finnish word for potato.


	26. Chapter 26

"He seems nice enough to me." Emil was looking through the forest in the direction the man had departed towards.  
  
"Hmm." Lalli wasn't convinced. He still felt very tense around this "Vasiliy".  
  
"I think he doesn't trust us. He didn't put that gun away at all." Onni observed all this in a tone that was quite neutral.  
  
"I mean, we could have run into something that needed it." Emil seemed very keen on rehabilitating the stranger. "And we did point a gun at him first. I guess it's fair."  
  
"He doesn't speak any normal languages." Lalli felt this was a pretty important point, if Emil was planning on making friends.  
  
"I guess not." Emil looked like he was thinking very hard. "I wish I could remember how we kept making it work before I learned to speak Finnish."  
  
"It didn't work."  
  
"Oh, yeah, I guess."  
  
Onni was stamping his feet. "I assume we're meant to wait here. I'm not keen on standing still for too long in this weather."  
  
"I'm sure he'll be back soon. He said there would be food. At least, I'm pretty sure he said there would be." Emil said, looking through the woods to the north again.  
  
Lalli copied Onni's efforts to stay warm while they waited. Hopefully this wouldn't be too long a delay. He was keenly aware that with every passing day, the wind grew colder, although if Emil was right about the food that was a compelling argument for spending a little more time on this. The sun began to move past its brief phase of real daylight, back into the long shadows that formed the winter afternoon.  
  
"So, is nobody else excited about the fact we just discovered like, an entire new country?"  
  
Onni and Lalli looked at Emil. "I suppose it's interesting." Onni looked pensive. "Although we don't know if it is an entire new country, yet."  
  
"He must live somewhere! I wonder if we'll meet his family."  
  
Lalli made an unhappy noise. Taking the time to make friends with potentially an entire village was not going to get them home before the waterways home iced over. Emil's need to make everyone like him had probably saved them all from getting shot a few hours beforehand, for which he was very grateful, but now it was turning out to be a bit impractical. Lalli decided to just quietly remind him of their need to move once he'd spent a couple more hours getting this detour out of his system. He could be very silly about a lot of things, but he couldn't argue with the seasons, and wouldn't argue with Lalli insisting on something.  
  
Someone was approaching through the woods. It was Vasiliy again, this time with three extra people. Lalli stiffened. Two more of them had guns, including a diminutive old woman that was flanking Vasiliy with an extremely purposeful look on her face. She walked right up to Onni, who shrank back a little from the invasion of his personal space, and peered up at him through narrowed eyes. She had a shrewd, wrinkly little face that was partly covered up at the sides by her thick, head-enveloping scarf. Lalli could sense that there was a great power in her.  
  
"Hello." Onni said, leaning back even more. "Do you understand 'not immune'?"  
  
She was circling him, twanging a string on his kantele without asking and putting her face close enough she could have smelled him. It was like seeing someone inspect a sheep. He cowered slightly despite her being half his size, likely sensing her power too, looking very confused about what to do and trying to avoid touching her.  
  
The old woman finally stepped back from him. " _Yurevich!_ "  
  
Vasiliy's attention snapped to her. Lalli had no idea what she started to tell him, but Vasiliy was nodding. He said something to the three people, then waved at Emil, making a vague gesture that looked like yawning and miming sleep. When he ran off again, the three people remained. The old woman was finally backing away from Onni, appraising him and the other two with a face Lalli couldn't discern any clear emotion from. She appeared to come to a decision, and the two others she'd brought with her - both men, quite tall - moved to the sides of where Lalli, Onni and Emil were standing.  
  
"Wait, are we being taken prisoner?" Emil looked confused. Onni just sighed in resignation at this new development. The old woman was beckoning them along. Given that she had a gun, and one of her men had one too, and that they were surrounded with no pre-existing plan, there seemed to be no other option but to follow her. They were led, or escorted, or whatever was happening here, out of the forest. Nobody actually pointed a gun at them this time, at least, nor did they try anything aggressive.  
  
The journey proceeded in silence. First they walked for quite a while over clear area that appeared to have no use other than providing line of sight, then began to cross land which was furrowed with long ditches. They were still quite obvious, even under the layer of snow that had fallen so far. It looked very much like the farmland around Keuruu did in the winter. Dotted throughout the fields, he could see the occasional building.  
  
They reached the edge of the lake again. There was a bridge ahead of them with a tall gate where it met the land, leading onto a large island. There were a few buildings here as well, although there was no sign of further people. The water spanned by the bridge was wide enough that Lalli couldn't make out a huge amount of detail on the island, but based on how few trees there appeared to be, he guessed this was largely farmland too. The woman stopped, holding up a hand.  
  
"I hope she realises I'm not immune." Onni said. Based on her next actions, though, Lalli suspected she didn't need to be told to be cautious. They were being herded again, towards a small cabin just before the bridge. One of the men opened the door for them and gestured them inside, which everyone complied with. Emil was finally starting to look very nervous about the whole situation. Once everyone had gathered inside the tiny space, the old woman clapped her hands, commanding their attention.  
  
Her words were still totally unintelligible as she indicated the pile of bedrolls and the wood stove, then tapped at the window and pointed out the nearby outhouse through it. Her gesturing once she was done explaining seemed pretty clear, though. She also wanted them to wait where they were left. She was pointing towards the bridge and making obviously negative hand gestures, only stopping when Onni nodded understanding. No following. The stern finger she held up and the way she patted her gun made it clear she expected to get what she wanted from them.  
  
Finally, Lalli, Onni and Emil were left alone again. Lalli wasn't sure what to do. The promise of firepower backing up her request to stay put should probably be treated as serious. None of them had any idea how many were on the other side of that bridge, nor how close a watch was being kept. Of course, they could attempt to trace their steps back rather than following, but now the question was whether they'd run into even more people willing to treat them as a threat. This seemed like a pretty obvious attempt to quarantine them, which would take two weeks he was not willing to lose. All of this was incredibly stressful to think about, and then to add to that, Lalli had no idea exactly what the rules were about the distance he was allowed to be from this building. Dealing with people who didn't speak Finnish was possibly his least favourite thing.  
  
"We're going to be stuck here for two weeks, aren't we." Emil had clearly come to approximately the same conclusion.  
  
Onni gave another one of his resigned sighs. "So much for getting to Saimaa before everything freezes."  
  
Lalli decided the best course of action was just to start the fire. At least they had one, and it was getting dark enough that maybe today should just be written off. He found a dented little tin on top of the little woodpile, helpfully equipped with flint and tinder. While he took the time to shave a few rooster tails into the sides of the smallest wood pieces, he found that there was plenty of dry birch bark tucked in among the logs. He'd been spending weeks helping his initial sparks along with a whisper of magic, finding nothing out there that wasn't just a little too snowy to be really good, but when he arranged the beginnings of his fire here it caught beautifully. They wouldn't be too terribly cold tonight, at least.  
  
There was a knock on the door, and Emil opened it. "Oh!" He stepped back as one of the men from before entered, holding a basket, and left it on the floor. The man appeared to appraise the situation and be happy with it, and after he left they found the basket to be full of bread. Lalli's stomach twinged. There had been no food yet today, and bread was something he hadn't tasted in about two months. When he took his first bite, the taste of fresh starchy food after weeks of lean protein, pure sugar and fat was so good as to be almost overwhelming. While those tins of milk had helped in a way, tasting bread really brought home that his body had been missing out on some things, and it felt very good to finally meet the need. The pieces of fish tucked under the bread, one small floured item for each of them, were cold but had at some point been fried. It tasted like extreme luxury.  
  
He was still deeply unhappy about the fact that they'd gotten themselves into this situation. Despite the fact he'd been threatened with being shot twice today, these people feeding him bread did reassure him that they didn't actually want to kill him, so the main worry was how this delay was going to affect their journey. Soon, the temperatures would plunge down into the coldest part of the year, and frostbite or worse would become an even more real possibility as they completed the final leg of their journey. None of them had left home with Feburary temperatures clearly in mind, and even that was assuming they ever got the chance to excuse themselves from these people and go home. He couldn't know at all what they expected here.  
  
"I truly hope we don't have to stay here until after the winter, but if we're here for too long, it might be wise." Onni spoke after a long silence. It wasn't actually reassuring to realise he was thinking along quite similar lines.  
  
"There's a lot of people waiting for us." Emil had rolled out his bed and was lying down on it, staring at the ceiling.  
  
"That reminds me." Onni said. "I talked to that woman you've been working with, Lalli. Sanna, the mage, made her way to visit me last night."  
  
Emil sat up and spoke before Lalli could reply. "The one Laura's been seeing?"  
  
"I have no idea. The important part is, she wanted to know if we were alive."  
  
"So she's talking to you? Did she say anything else?" Emil brightened significantly at the idea of news from home.  
  
 "Now that I'm thinking about it, yes." Emil jumped a bit as Onni's tone took on an exasperated turn. "Did you really leave a note saying we were going somewhere, but not _why_?"  
  
"Um." Emil was thinking about it. "Honestly, I feel like I wrote that note about a hundred years ago now, but probably, yeah. Sorry."  
  
This could easily have been the starting point for a real lecture, but Onni refrained. "I suppose it's all fixed now. They know we went to get Lalli, and that we succeeded, and that we're coming home eventually. I didn't get to say where we are, but at least that's something." He started eating the last of his share of the bread, which he'd abandoned during his mild brooding earlier.  
  
Emil's eyes went wide. " _Helvete_. I just realised something. I never told my aunt either. I usually write to her every week. Oh, she's gonna be worried."


	27. Chapter 27

Siv was starting to feel slightly awkward. After making her way to Keuruu, she'd realised she actually had no idea where, specifically, Emil lived. He'd never given her an exact street address, claiming that the size and nature of this place meant it didn't really need them. It certainly appeared not to _have_ them, which Siv thought was not quite the same thing. She'd arrived late enough in the evening that there were no offices open to request any kind of look at an organising list or a map of the base.  
  
Eventually, resorting to stopping random people, asking them if they spoke Icelandic, and then seeing if they recognised Emil by name had worked out. She'd ended up being directed to some workshop where thankfully a man was still packing up for the day, who introduced himself as Antti, then informed her with an air of regret that she was not going to find her nephew anywhere on this base. "I can tell you where he normally lives, though. I imagine the others will put you up tonight." He looked sympathetic and rather worried himself. Siv mentally noted the directions she was given, and after following them, did indeed find the lightly adorned door he'd described. The young woman who answered the door had a thin face and light hair, and greeted her with a confused-looking _"Moi. Kuka-"_  
  
"I'm sorry, I don't speak any Finnish." Siv remembered that Emil's housemates spoke Swedish, but she tried Icelandic first, still not entirely sure this was the right place. The woman responded in the same language. "Um, I think you have the wrong house, we aren't expecting anyone and we don't know you." Her accent was good enough that the directness surely wasn't just poor language skills. Emil hadn't lied about people being generally blunter here, then.  
  
"I'm looking for Emil Västerström. I was told perhaps the people here would know about him?"  
  
The woman looked confused. "Do you want to speak Swedish?"  
  
"Yes, that would be good." Siv switched into her mother tongue.  
  
"Are you the aunt?"  
  
_The aunt._ Alright then. "I'm Emil's aunt, yes. I was wondering why I haven't heard from him. Apparently he's not in Keuruu anymore, although nobody's told me yet where he's relocated to. And my name's Siv, if he never mentioned that."  
  
"Sini." A hand was offered as the same time as the name. When Sini led her into the house, she called out three names. "Laura! Miri! Jaana! We have an unexpected guest!"  
  
The first person to reach the bottom of the stairs had run down with a look of joy, which turned to crushing disappointment as she saw Siv. _"Saatana! Kun kuulin ruotsia, mä luulin että, se oli..."_  
  
"It's his aunt Siv." Sini said.  
  
_"Voi perkele."_ The disappointed woman, round-faced with dark eyes and hair, now looked very exasperated. She finally switched into Swedish. "We should have sent a letter already."  
  
"I don't know if it would even have arrived by now, even if we had right away." Sini seemed unfazed by the slightly excessive grumpiness of her housemate.  
  
Two others followed the first woman downstairs, thankfully picking up immediately on the need for Swedish and already hearing half the conversation. "So you're Siv." The one with shorter hair was quick on the uptake, and introduced herself. "Laura."  
  
"Miri" followed, then the grumpy one introduced herself as Jaana, each shaking Siv's hand briefly. She recognised these names from Emil's letters. Now would have been a moment to voice appreciation for finally getting to meet them, but it sounded like something even more confusing than she'd expected was going on.  
  
"So, can anyone explain what letters you're talking about, and why Emil isn't here, and why nobody's given me a short explanation yet?" Siv asked, fearing slightly for the answer.  
  
"Oh, dear." Sini said.  
  
"I think you should sit down." Miri gestured to a chair at the table that took up most of the space.  
  
Siv sat and listened to the explanation, feeling her heart sink. "And he's been how much longer than he said he'd be?"  
  
"About a month longer, but listen, there's good news as well. We heard a few days ago that he's alive and on the way home." Miri's tone was very confident.  
  
"How far off?" Siv was astounded that they could have brought a radio on such short notice and with as few supplies as they'd apparently left with, but that was amazing news.  
  
"Ah, we're not sure. The conversation got cut off before we could learn much."  
  
"Can you remember what the conversation was like? I know it's not easy to remember these things, but depending on the type of radio the sound might tell you something..." Siv had no hope of actually working anything specific out from whatever vague details they could recall, but it might give some idea of whether they'd gone as far in a month as they theoretically could have.  
  
Jaana made a face. "Er, there was no radio. We did it the old fashioned way."  
  
The bubble of hope Siv was feeling stopped growing. "The old fashioned way?"  
  
"A mage we know spoke to Onni in a dream." It was said matter-of-factly, in a tone that said she expected to be challenged, but not convinced out of anything. Siv's heart fell even further than before. She had never regretted letting Emil move to a theocratic backwater more than she did now. The look on her face must have shown, because Jaana sighed. "For what it's worth, I doubt Onni would say everything was under control unless it was going very well indeed." This did seem accurate as an assessment of character, but wasn't actually a comfort when the "information" relayed was based on something someone had _seen in a dream_.  
  
"Look, you're welcome to stay here until he gets back, given you've come all this way to find him. You can have his room." Jaana was clearly trying to be tactful about Siv's incredulous reaction, but her frustration at it was obvious. "And I'm sorry about this. We're worried too."  
  
Siv was directed upstairs and into a room where she could dump her things. She'd brought a suitcase with enough clothes for a week, thinking that once she'd located Emil it would be nice to actually have him show her around the place where he lived now. Emil's room was messy as ever, although the tiny amount of things he'd moved here with helped give the illusion of it not being a complete tip. When she looked under the bed for a place to stash her suitcase, she discovered several items she really hadn't needed to know about. Well, at least he and Lalli had clearly been having a nice time, before they'd both disappeared into the Russian wilderness.  
  
Now that she was thinking about that, she decided it might be a good idea to strip the sheets off the bed before she slept in it. The memory of how she'd had to do Emil's horrible teenage boy laundry was not that distant in her mind. She still recalled very clearly that the timing of Emil living with them had made many of his most awkward stages take place under her roof. For example, the time one of her "romance" novels had gone missing, one she was sure Torbjörn was not likely to borrow, only to turn up weeks later in the bathroom after Emil had spent a while allegedly washing his hair. Ever the master of subtlety, he had managed to dog-ear every single all-male scene in it and nothing else. She hadn't been at all surprised, although she'd been quite annoyed at the damage to the pages.  
  
Her first thought had been to leave a note just requesting that he not bend her books, but on considering the issue, she had realised he'd potentially missed a few important information sessions with his lack of early public school. The leaflets she ended up procuring from the clinic in town had been aimed strictly at dispelling any factual inaccuracies he would have picked up from such literature, ugly pulpy paper covered in a typeface chosen very clearly for function over form. She'd still included the note about the bent pages on top, with an additional reminder that he had pocket money and could buy his own books. He hadn't looked her in the eye for two weeks, but at that age, that had been the level of drama he applied to pretty much everything. In hindsight, reacting in a purely educational spirit still felt like it had been about right.  
  
Thinking about times she'd handled things with Emil decently just made all this feel more upsetting. Of course, he was a grown man now, but she couldn't help but feel a little responsible for starting the chain of events that had led to him moving out here and then doing this. She finished removing the sheets from the bed, hoping she'd be able to somehow launder them tomorrow, and extracted a few things from her luggage that she'd brought as presents. Thank goodness she'd thought to bring something, given that she was now imposing without Emil even being there to justify it.  
  
When she returned downstairs, everyone was still there.  
  
"Hey. Have you had something to eat yet?" Miri's tone was quite gentle. Somehow, Siv knew they'd all just been discussing how exactly to behave towards her.  
  
"Not since lunchtime." She was quite hungry, now she thought about it. The stew she was served was surprisingly nice. Once she'd eaten, Jaana addressed her decisively. "We are all quite sure we're okay with you staying here till Emil gets back, you know."  
  
"You don't know how long that is." Siv reminded her.  
  
"Well, I know you have a family to get back to if that's your choice, but we're not going to make you leave." There was something behind this insistence, Siv was sure, but she couldn't work out what exactly.  
  
"Yes. It's not fair to be left waiting when someone you care about is out there in danger. This way, you get any news as fast as possible, and when he gets back you won't have to wait to know." Laura had also taken on the tone of seriousness.  
  
"I really think I can cope, if me staying does turn out to be a problem." Siv wasn't sure what to make of the sudden protectiveness, and fairly aware that a group of young people living in a house together wouldn't have infinite resources to share.  
  
"No, really. Not knowing in this situation is awful. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. So, you're welcome for as long as you like." Well, Jaana had said it many times now. Siv could only be grateful for whatever was motivating their sensitivity. She supposed the way Emil had described them acting did show they seemed to really care about him. It would have been truly lovely to have been in a place to appreciate him making such a sweet group of friends. Somehow, she did feel that he wasn't yet dead, and that she would get the chance to see them interact eventually. Still, it felt a little bleak now.  
  
Perhaps it was time to lighten the mood. "Well, thank you. Let me know if I can be helpful around here. Now, Miri, Emil mentioned once that you were very impressed by bright yarn. I know it's a bit of a risky business buying yarn for other people, but this should be a pretty versatile weight and amount, have a look."  
  
Miri picked up the jewel-purple ball Siv handed her with delight. "Oh, wow! I won't know what to make with this, it's too nice." The praise felt slightly too high for such rough yarn, but then, from what she'd heard this bright colour would be quite unusual here.  
  
"Highlight something with it, maybe." This was small talk she could do.  
  
"Oh, yes, maybe just small bits in a lot of things, I could stick to using- oh, what is it in Swedish?" She started describing the process of what she intended to do, miming the slipped stitches and turning, and Siv thought she recognised the idea.  
  
"Intarsia?"  
  
"Yes, probably! If I use that, I can put a little in everything for ages." With this turn of the conversation, the mood seemed to have been lightened. Siv offered to do the washing up, a tactic she felt sure couldn't fail at making a long-term guest more welcome. They did all seem like genuinely kind and bright people. While she would have to write to Torbjörn to work out exactly what was done at home for now, it wasn't like he was working a huge amount at the moment. She supposed she'd better settle in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Finnish sentence Jaana is coming out with is "When I heard Swedish, I assumed that it was..."


	28. Chapter 28

When Vasya had finally been able to go home, his grandma had greeted him with great annoyance. His lateness had not gone unnoticed, but she'd forgiven him eventually, and he'd slept almost until dawn the next morning. By then, the entire tiny population of Mantiansaari was already aware that there were mysterious strangers outside the gates. The people who elected to both farm on Mantiansaari and stay there in winter did tend to be immune, so over the course of the first day most of them traipsed over the bridge to peer at the newcomers. There wasn't much to see for the adults, who mostly just confirmed for themselves that they were indeed just as the last ten visitors had reported before going home. Without the ability to have a conversation, there was only so much interest.  
  
The village children, however, were being impossible. Every single one of them wanted to mash their face against the window of the hut to stare at the wild outsiders. Those who weren't immune whined at their parents' restraint, and those that were immune huddled outside the cabin, trying to get a glimpse of them and running away with squeals of excitement whenever the big mage emerged. Vasya was left there to make sure no non-immune children strayed too close, since he was the least busy of the people the strangers already knew. He spent most of the day leaning against the nearby barn, listening to them discuss what the reward would be for the first one to brave touching the foriegn wizard. Their discussion had the extremely serious tone particular to small children discussing a mighty challenge. Onni's big cloak, stern face and mysterious voice had made him an instant object of fascination.   
  
Skinny, grumpy Lalli, who Vasya had been told was also likely some kind of mage, seemed incredibly annoyed by the treatment. The others, at least, took it far more in their stride. When one small girl had lost her mittens running away, Emil picked them up by their string and tossed them to her rather than making her run back. She showed all her friends the mittens that the outlander had touched, the children passing them around themselves with great gravitas.  
  
They were still not sick of it the next day, insisting on telling everyone they could about their important discoveries. They found an new audience when Anatoli, a ruddy man who was friendly despite his general quiet, arrived on the dock as he did every week. He came from Valaam regularly to swap out anything that had broken on the farming outpost, the means for many complex tasks being only available on the main island. The first thing any of the children did was run up to him and announce that they had strangers to see. "Did Petja come this week? We want to show him!" Their friend from the big village had indeed followed his father to work again, so they took the small boy by the hand and dragged him out across the bridge, zooming across the snow together like a little herd of animals made of fluffy hats.  
  
"He is immune, yes?" Vasya confirmed with Anatoli, before running after them to supervise. The pace of the children's travel flagged a little as they crossed the island from docks to bridge, but they were undeterred, insisting Vasya assist them when their own legs wouldn't suffice. Onni was leaning against the walls of the cabin when they all arrived, looking a little annoyed at the idea of another day of this lot trying to sneak up on him and grab at his cloak.  
  
"Petja, look. He's a foriegn mage." Petja was herded forward, everyone very keen on making sure he shared the fun. Onni regarded the sight of yet another child with resignation, and gave him the same curt word he'd given all of them. _"Terve."_  
  
Petja's face lit up. _"Terveh!"_ He and Anatoli were from one of the families that preserved the old lakeland dialects, and he was still young enough to not realise sometimes how extremely small his home language was. Anatoli did manage to get him to mostly speak Russian around others, but it wasn't like it mattered when these people didn't speak Russian anyway. Vasya let him babble, then began to notice Onni had done a double take at Petja's reply, now staring at him talk with great interest. Onni was speaking to the small boy again, his intense gaze full of surprise.  
  
_"Midä?"_ Petja seemed very confused by the words he was hearing. Onni spoke again, very slowly. _"Ai."_ Vasya was looking between him and Onni, and Onni was looking between Petja and Vasya, all parties seemingly unsure exactly what was going on. Lalli's head appeared out the door, his eyes wide, followed by Emil looking as confused as the rest. Both watched in silence as Onni had an awkward-looking exchange with Petja.  
  
"He talks funny. I think he wants to see Ižä." Vasya remembered that was what Petja called his father. The information had been relayed with total nonchalance, and none of the children at all appreciated the urgency of Vasya herding them back so he could work out what was going on here. Once Anatoli had been located and convinced to try speaking to the strangers, the conversation took a long time. Neither party could quite get the full meaning of each other's speech, but Onni was apparently very insistent, repeatedly trying to get as much across as possible. Apparently, the gist of the conversation was that they were trying to go home.  
  
"So they don't actually want to come into the village. They want to go west, where they say their own 'Suomi' is." Anatoli had left Onni where he was with several reassurances that he wasn't leaving forever, then come back into the village to report on what he'd heard. Inga received the report with interest. When she'd come to examine the reports of a strange party with a mage yesterday, her conclusion had been that these travelers had great magic, but one that was not within her knowledge. Coming from such a venerable icon of power, this had been strange indeed. She was keen to make sure they passed through with minimal issues. Despite this breakthrough in communication being technically a good development, Vasya felt some disappointment. He'd started to become curious about these people and didn't really want them to leave. It was just a little exciting, thinking that maybe there were parts of the world nobody had any idea about, and getting to meet people from them.  
  
" _Suomi_. I thought that land was a myth." Inga was pensive. Vasya was sure she was thinking of the same nonsense nursery rhyme he was. _I went to the country called Suomi, where there are skies in every house._ The idea that these people might be from, and on their way back to, a country from a song was even more exciting. Two of even this tiny group of them seemed to be mages, and they technically didn't know about the third one. Perhaps everyone there was a mage. It seemed about as possible as anything else.  
  
"I suppose we can hasten their journey by taking them across the lake. Most of it's still clear." Inga was away from the world of nursery rhymes and back down to business. "There's no sense keeping them here against their will. Vasya, they know you now. Will you show them the way?"  
  
"I don't understand them." Vasya would have liked very much to follow them some more, especially now their intentions had been established, but this seemed pretty important.  
  
"Anatoli will try to explain why you're coming with them. You can take them on the boat across the lake and show them where to sleep for the night, until they leave the land we know."  
  
Vasya didn't know the west side of the lake as extremely well as the east side, but he guessed he'd still spent much more time there than any of the three he'd picked up, and the patrol schedule of the winter did give him some free time. Anatoli claimed the three hadn't even known people lived on these islands, so a guide did seem like it might be helpful. And if he happened to learn something about the location of mysterious Suomi while escorting these people, then it would likely be the most exciting thing he'd ever done in his life.  
  
"Okay. I'll tell Grandma I might take a little while."  
  
Inga handed him a bag full of herbs, pungent and tied with a drawstring. "Put this in your jacket. It should not be too dangerous a journey with the winter so deep now, but I feel the way home will be very cold." Vasya did so, knowing that her magic would work to fortify him against the inclement weather and wild forest's wiles. Inga's gifts were many, and always appreciated by the people of Mantiansaari. "Thank you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Terve" is one of many ways to say "hello" in Finnish. "Terveh" is one Karelian variant.


	29. Chapter 29

Emil hadn't really understood the conversation Onni had with this new man. Lalli had listened in on it with some interest. Understanding whatever language this man was speaking was even harder than understanding Danish as Swede, or so it seemed to him. Onni was less bothered and seemed to be able to get a few things across, including their destination. He had also spent some time insisting on communicating that he wasn't immune, reacting with relief when he learned that all the children that had been allowed over the bridge would be fine. The final thing he learned was that it would be possible for them to be escorted across the lake, and even to the edge of the lands these people knew.  
  
Lalli grumbled about the prospect of the crossing. Boats were never a good time for him. Onni was pretty sure they'd said they could drop them all off on a far part of the western shore. They resorted to pointing at a map of the lake to confirm, and Lalli came to look as well, comparing it to his own memory of the map he'd seen back in Finland. By his reckoning, it was going to be a mere 50 kilometers between the drop-off point and the east side of Saimaa. The Russians seemed shocked to hear it, questioning the process by which he'd arrived at this idea. Emil supposed not everyone was used to Lalli's memory for maps.  
  
He trusted it, though. Lalli had never misremembered a map he'd had the time to memorise. Being home safe seemed so close he could almost taste it. If this went well, it would turn the delay into a week cut off their journey. Even Lalli seemed positive about this, despite declaring hopelessly that he wouldn't even bother eating breakfast tomorrow. Once the Russians had left and they'd returned to their cabin, Emil waited for Onni to wander outside again and grabbed Lalli, pulling him into a corner nobody looking into the window could see.  
  
"We're going home." Lalli just looked at him when Emil cradled his cheeks and beamed.  
  
"We've been doing that for a month."  
  
"Yes, but we'll actually get there soon."  
  
"Hopefully." Despite the commitment to some pessimism, Lalli did take the chance to lean in and kiss him, holding him lightly by the waist. They heard Onni's steps in front of the door far too soon and sprung apart before he could see, giving each other furtive looks all through the rest of the evening.  
  
Vasiliy turned up the next morning looking keen. He'd been hanging around them a lot since he'd brought them home to get quarantined, coming to supervise the children who bothered them every day. Emil wondered if Vasiliy had ever met foriegners before now. Lalli didn't seem to have, before he had ended up on that mission, and he knew many people even in Sweden who had barely ever spoken to anyone from another country. The things implied by the village full of strange-talking people they'd discovered were still swirling in his head. Onni said the mystery translator had come from "the big island". There were more of them, somewhere. When they got back to Finland, they'd be coming with real news, although Emil had little mental image of what that announcement to the world would look like. Nothing like this had happened since before he was born. It was a hard idea to get his head around.  
  
Emil learned where some of them were when they finally got Lalli in the boat, which had been brought around from some dock on the far side so they could depart without passing through the village. It was fast enough for its size, and as they crossed the lake they passed the shores of a huge island. A few people were stood on the shore, watching their boat go by. Apparently news traveled fast on these islands. It really did look in many ways like Saimaa, except for the minor differences in dress of the inhabitants. The small boy from yesterday was there, waving excitedly and yelling his version of _terve_ over and over. Emil wondered if he'd ever get to know what the "big island" was like in its centre.  
  
Making their way across the lake took all of the daylight. The little motor on the boat needed refuelling more than once, and the water was open enough that small waves could form and break on the hull, making Lalli miserable. Vasiliy spent most of the day staring at the water and talking to the boatman, who was regarding Lalli's continual dry heaving over the side with mild concern. The wind that whipped the waves up was cold, leaving a little ice on Emil's hair and making him wish he could be moving around more. When they finally reached the other shore, they had already lit a lamp and placed it on the prow. It cast a light that wobbled and danced on their faces as they unloaded their small set of supplies and waved goodbye to the skipper. Vasiliy had brought a pack with him and was probably the best-resourced of them all.  
  
Their walk that day wasn't long, probably a good thing given Lalli's refusal to eat anything he'd just throw up before their journey. Vasiliy did notice that they didn't have any food with them when they'd made camp. Emil hoped that the stuff he was sharing wasn't all meant for him. They hadn't tried to communicate with each other very much. Everyone was aware of the plan that had been made when they had translation, and that would have to be enough. It was slightly mysterious that they hadn't been able to spare anyone who had some mutual intelligibility with Onni. Emil's best guess was that they were rare, or that perhaps the rare quality was having few enough duties to be able to spare a week doing this for some random strangers.  
  
He thought he managed to get across gratitude for his dinner, and Vasiliy just nodded politely when Emil rambled at him, explaining that Lalli could and would hunt eventually. It technically didn't matter that he couldn't understand him now, anyway. He'd find out the same information eventually when it happened. Emil felt a little bad for Vasiliy sleeping in his own little tent, when it was so much warmer to share, but his clothes did look very well insulated. The distant howl of wolves woke Emil up a couple of times in the night, but it was far away enough that he always found his way back to sleep.  
  
Their guide was doing alright for himself, despite the language barrier. Emil thought he looked a little awkward the next morning, when the others were congratulating Lalli for another successful night snare, but he seemed content enough to walk in silence for the rest of the time. They all caught the meaning of Vasiliy stopping and pointing at an area of forest as the evening fell, especially with Lalli to confirm it did indeed look like a fine place to camp. They were keeping a good pace, and the estimate of 50km started to seem very short indeed as they set up for the second night. Emil didn't know exactly how far they'd walked, but it had been a long day with few breaks.  
  
"It can't be more than a couple of days away." Emil was feeding twigs into the fire.  
  
"One more day. Two if we have to deal with something." Lalli knew better than to show real optimism, but even he looked like he was starting to believe they were almost home safe. Onni stared into the fire, not looking ready to share his thoughts. He didn't look unhappy, at least. Emil would breath a sigh of relief when Onni was finally within cleansed land again.  
  
The next day, they did have to deal with something. They'd tried not to worry unduly about the howls in the distance the night before. Wolves had come near them once already on this journey, and been scared away quickly. It used up precious ammo to shoot a gun at them, so they had tried to rely on Onni shouting spells of intimidation and posturing with his cloak, then when they'd finally resorted to the gun it had sent them on their way very reliably. These were persistent in their stalking, though. The sound tailed them through the woods. Emil didn't know what to make of it.  
  
"I think they're beasts." Onni was nervous. "Still very close to their original form." Emil remembered that being true of a dog beast once, before he'd provoked it and seen it transform.  
  
"We shouldn't lead them back to Saimaa." Lalli was clearly thinking hard. "I would guess there's four of them."  
  
Vasiliy watched this exchange with worry. Emil turned to him. "Four wolves." He held up four fingers and mimed listening. Vasiliy nodded. There was no indication of whether the right information had been imparted at all, but Vasiliy did eventually take his gun off his back, stalking through the woods with an increased wariness. Emil couldn't help but see him and Lalli as somehow akin, despite their total inability to communicate with one another. The way he squatted down in the snow to think or work on something looked very similar to Lalli when he set a trap. When both of them had shouldered their guns and started appraising the woods around them with sharp eyes, there was something very alike about that too.    
  
The wolves grew closer as they made a slower path through the forest. Onni grew more nervous. "These aren't healthy creatures." They were going to be tailed until they stopped, so stopping became the only option.  
  
"Does Vasiliy know you're not immune?" Emil asked, as he and Lalli made a back-to-back circle around Onni.  
  
"He should." Knowledge or not, Vasiliy did pick up on what was going on, placing himself as the third point of the triangle. They had found a clearing which Onni said he would try to work with. As the wolf-beasts approached, Onni sat cross-legged in their circle and began to sing and play. Vasiliy looked back at the source of the sound for a second, then whipped his head forward again, training his vision and gun on the gaps in the trees. Lalli's stance was already tight as stretched wire, looking down the barrel of his rifle. Emil had only Onni's knife and his own body, but more help would come soon. Onni's song was calling down something that was likely better than both their guns.  
  
As the first of the wolf-beasts ran into the clearing, the trees beside it exploded sideways, catching its body between shards of wood that shredded it in a blur of flesh and blood. It never had the chance to show its infection by more than its eyes. The second was already separating in the limbs as it came in from the other side, but was caught by one of Lalli's last bits of ammo to the head. The third one came roaring out all eyes and extra claws, so unnaturally fast that attempts to shoot it caught it only on its hind quarters, but there was a wind roaring too. This wind circled the clearing once and then again, moving in a way that could only be magic, twisting around the wolf-beast faster and faster until it became a billowing fire that incinerated the creature whole.  
  
Onni was flinching and roaring, and everyone was falling down, and the fourth wolf-beast followed so fast on the third one's tail that Lalli was scrambling to get his gun into position. He never needed to, because Vasiliy had rolled backwards and landed more or less on his feet, gun still in his hands. The spray of bullets did its job. The beast fell, jaws fixed open at a grotesquely wide angle, its body landing on the forest floor with an awful thud and crunch. Emil jumped to his feet and looked around to see if there were any more. Lalli seemed to have been correct. The winter woods were quiet again.  
  
Lalli got to his feet and walked over to Vasiliy. No words were exchanged, but the nod Lalli gave him was very appreciative. Emil decided to reinforce the message, clapping him on the shoulder. "Nice one." Vasiliy looked nervous still, staring in shock at the burning carcass of the third beast.  
  
"I know, Finnish magic. It's a lot to take in." Emil hoped his smile was reassuring. Onni was climbing to his feet, thankfully totally unscathed and able to pick his way through the carnage as they tried to move on as fast as they could. Everybody had to suppress a certain level of shaking as they got back to walking, wanting to put as much distance between themselves and the carnage as possible. Vasiliy kept furtively looking at Onni for the rest of the day, and tried to point out another campsite when night fell again. Emil was grateful for the chance to rest after the day they'd had.  
  
"No. We're close now." Lalli was very sure, and more eager than ever to keep putting the Silent World behind them. Shrugging, Emil turned to Vasiliy. "I guess you can go home. Thanks."  
  
Vasiliy didn't get the message at all, still following them despite the fact they were walking through the night and keeping up as fast a pace as they could. Their lamp was so low on fuel now. Emil hoped Lalli was as precisely right as he usually was.  
  
"We're so close to Saimaa now we must be past his own lands. I guess we can't stop him, though." Having an unexpected guest was a problem to process later. Lalli was looking back through the woods, still very spooked by their earlier encounter with the wolf-beasts. It had been a huge thing to deal with when they had been so sure they were practically home safe. The tramping onwards was mechanical at this point. Emil felt like he should be much more tired than he was, but if Lalli was sure enough to keep them walking, it must be soon. The anticipation animated him as if it had its own magic. Kilometers kept disappearing under their feet, Lalli wary, Onni resolute, Vasiliy wide-eyed.  
  
Emil held up the lamp as they finished crossing a clear patch of land. Its dim light illuminated the edge of a fence, slightly taller than any of them were. They'd encountered fences they needed to cross throughout this whole journey, but someone was maintaining this one and the clear zone right in front of it. Surely, it couldn't all be over this quickly. Despite knowing logically that this was often how the end of a long journey felt, it felt like a shock.  
  
Scaling the fence was a group effort. There was little purchase, and navigating the top was risky. From Lalli's precarious perch on the top with the lamp, he managed to haul Emil up as well, and the two of them worked together to pull Onni high enough that he could clamber up with hands flat on a few non-spiked sections. Vasiliy made his best effort to join in, despite this being as clear a sign as they could really give that it was time for him to turn back. Emil saw Vasiliy toss his gun over the wall as Onni landed on the other side with a grunt. He and Lalli were both still on top of the wall and able to lift him.  
  
"I think he wants to come with us." Emil was tentatively balancing forwards, mindful of the wire as he offered a hand to a grasping Vasiliy.  
  
"Should he?" Lalli was unsure.  
  
"Well, he's going to keep trying to get up here whether we help him or not." Vasiliy wasn't doing a bad job already, his first attempt to jump up almost succeeding in giving him purchase on the top. He would likely be following them if he really wanted to. Emil and Lalli worked together to haul him up and over. Emil lost a shred of his jacket to the spikes as he jumped down. The Silent World kept tearing fragments off, even right up to the end.  
  
This was farmland, now. It was bizarre to walk over the cultivated land of a country he knew again. The fact it must be nearly morning by now didn't make it any less surreal. He was tired enough for his vision to be blurring.  
  
Onni was the first to call out when they saw a house, continuing to yell as they approached. The dawn was faint but present now, letting the silhouette of the building stand out as the light behind them grew. A man poked his head out the door, looking grumpy, responding to Onni's "good morning" in the broadest Saimaa accent Emil had ever heard and with an attitude so familiarly Finnish he could have wept for joy.  
  
"Did you just come from the forest? What the _hell_ are you doing?"


	30. Chapter 30

Siv asked some questions the morning after she arrived and learned that one of Keuruu's few uses of electricity was a large public laundry facility. It was a relief to hear. She was just about old enough to remember the time before the electricity in Sweden became totally reliable, and laundry was one of the processes that became orders of magnitude more tedious without it. Over breakfast, the four women Siv would be indefinitely staying with tried to explain a few things about how Keuruu functioned.  
  
They had a few of the trappings of civilisation here, apparently far more than in the rest of Finland, but the uses of them were subject to an intense prioritisation process. It was both familiar and unfamiliar, seeming much like what she knew of the military in some ways, and in others seeming like the oddest version of a military she'd ever heard of.  
  
"Well, from what I've read it sounds like everything is kept a little more separate in Sweden. We all have a few different jobs here... then again, I suppose everyone has a few different things they do with their lives? I've never been to Sweden, so I can't actually say if it's really different." Miri seemed quite conscious of her backwoods perspective on the rest of the world.  
  
Siv confirmed that from what she'd seen so far, that sounded accurate enough. Apparently the man she'd met last night knew Emil from Cleansing work, but had also established himself as a dab hand with engines. It was a combination that seemed slightly odd to Siv, but perhaps was less so out here.  
  
The issue of the laundry was certainly interesting. Laura explained that there had been a vote at some point, and after maintaining the radio room, essential military equipment, and "the few medical things that aren't better served with mages", people had immediately opted to be freed from scrubbing cloth over a washboard. The concept of few medical procedures not being just left to the "mages" was deeply concerning, but the system for allocating resources seemed to have its own internal logic.  
  
Siv wasn't sure how people in Sweden would deal with a totally majority-rule use of electricity, but then, if she recalled correctly the Norwegians also did a lot of things in their big longhouses that the Swedes mostly kept to the private sphere. When she thought about it, perhaps it wasn't that strange a response to the challenges of life further out on the fringes, especially in a place where military and civilian life seemed interwoven so oddly.  
  
"I'm even more grateful we have machine laundry now that there's a baby coming." Miri said. Siv hadn't realised that this was happening yet. She looked between the four of them, unsure if she should ask who it was.  
  
Jaana raised her hand, looking amused. "It's not that far along yet, but it's definitely past the danger zone, so I think we can say we're expecting it. Nearly four months." Now that Siv was paying attention, she realised she could see the beginnings of it showing. It was just hard to tell under the loose tunics everyone here seemed to wear.  
  
Jaana continued her thoughts on the topic, something Siv was noticing she tended to do whenever she was given the chance. "Emil doesn't know about it yet, which is a bit sad. I'm hoping he'll be hanging around for a while to help look after it." Siv just nodded, not sure she was ready to think about these people's blind faith in Emil being alive this early in the morning, then did a double take as she processed a possible implication of Jaana's phrasing. "Wait, is it- it's not-"  
  
All four of them looked at her with slight confusion for a moment, then Laura abruptly snorted and started laughing. The further laughter that ensued as the other three realised what Siv was asking was, she supposed, an answer to her question. Jaana was the last one to stop, steadying herself on the table and taking a deep breath out. "Oh my days. No. It was some guy I was sleeping with last summer." She cackled to herself again for a few more seconds. "Ahh, that's not a question I was expecting. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to laugh for so long."  
  
"No, honestly, it's fine. I mean, I asked like that because yes, it would have been very surprising. It's just, the way you put it..." Siv trailed off, unsure what she was getting at here.  
  
Jaana was waiting for her to finish, so Siv tried again to express what she meant. "Well, I suppose you must be very good friends, if you feel you can rely on him for that."  
  
Jaana shrugged. "We live together, I guess we'll keep living together, he likes kids. I think it'll work out." Again, Siv wasn't sure how she would have felt about that arrangement, but she could again discern some internal logic. If this was how Emil was living now, then it was fair enough, especially compared to the part about all his friends believing in magic now.  
  
All four of them had to go to work, so as they put away the breakfast things Siv found herself at a loose end. Laura had an idea for how she could spend part of the day. "We're low on flour and a few other things. If you go to the storehouse in the middle of the day, you should miss any queuing."  
  
"Queuing?"  
  
"Well, it's just that if you go at the wrong time it's kind of crowded."  
  
Siv wasn't quite sure she got the system that was in place here, but she took a list, directions, some bags, and the assurance that someone there would speak Icelandic. The streets outside were cold, but bright this morning. Perhaps soon they'd finally start to feel the fact they were on the good side of the winter solstice. It had been dark when she'd arrived last night, and now she could see better Keuruu appeared even more patchwork than it had before. Some parts were far more military in feel than others, while others seemed to exemplify the kind of peasant life she'd always seen Finns stereotyped with. Siv passed a workshop full of half-fixed and fairly advanced vehicles that seemed to exist right alongside a pen full of sheep marked in various colours.  
  
When she arrived at the storehouse, she entered by a big barn-like door, passing through a small reception area and finding a warehouse-style stash of food arranged in long aisles. Searching for people, she located a woman of around her own age who asked for a few details. "You're visiting those four office skalds?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Can I have some details?"  
  
"Um. It's a family visit, of sorts." Siv didn't know what she'd been expecting, but it wasn't this specific line of questioning.  
  
"But for how long?" The woman didn't seem to care exactly why she was here.  
  
"I'm not sure."  
  
"I'll assume a week. Do you know where anything in here is?"  
  
Siv said she didn't. She was shown into a big storehouse, from which the woman extracted some big scoops of flour that went into Siv's bags, as well as potatoes and some other goods.  
  
"Do you need some kind of proof of who I am?" Siv had some idea in her head when she arrived that she might pay for things like this as a token of gratitude for the bed, but that didn't seem to be possible here.  
  
The woman shrugged. "I think we can assume you're not in Keuruu just for flour handouts. I'll ask Sini to confirm you are who you say you are, if I remember. Oh, if you see her tonight, tell her to expect someone new on her next shift, we got him last week but she's barely here so I don't think she knows yet." Still not having introduced herself, the woman went back to rearranging boxes. Siv hadn't known Sini came to work here sometimes as well as being employed for more academic work. It seemed again like an odd mix of jobs to have.  
  
Siv carted the goods back to the house, tentatively placing her pile of things down in front of the door to free up one hand, then spending far more time than she expected jiggling the key. Once everything had been hauled inside, she remembered that laundry was also on her to-do list. Perhaps finding out how that worked would have to happen tomorrow, as nobody would be back until the evening. She occupied herself reading a book in the kitchen, kept company by the gentle bloops of the big demijohn of wine brewing in the corner.  
  
People arrived home at varying times, but by the mid evening the kitchen was full again. The conversation was kept to Swedish for the most part. Siv appreciated the effort to include her.  
  
"We really are sorry we didn't let you know earlier what's going on. We were waiting for real news, and once we had it you were already on your way, I think." Miri was so genuinely apologetic that Siv managed to suppress the face she wanted to make thinking of their "real news".  
  
"Perhaps I should take your contacts so I actually have someone to ask if this happens again." Siv took out a notebook and pen, and they all obliged her. One name made her pause. "Wait a moment, you're not _that_ 'L. Syrjälä'?"  
  
Laura looked bemused. "Which one are you thinking of?"  
  
"There's an L. Syrjälä who's cropped up a lot in some papers I've been reading. I don't strictly speaking work in science any more, but I do like to keep up with new research, and there's been some interesting stuff about sheep immunity coming out of Finland." Siv wished she had any idea how common various names actually were here.  
  
Laura looked incredibly pleased to hear it. "Yep, that's me!" Siv was a little surprised. She had expected such a sharp and prolific researcher to be perhaps older, and certainly not mostly employed doing something else.  
  
"So that's within the remit of skalds here?"  
  
"Ugh, not really. I do get some exemptions because my project is so big, but it's still a lot to balance. The mages help when I ask, though, which is really great." There it was again. Siv had seen it already, of course. Reading the few papers produced in Finland was always a bizarre exercise, as it forced one to pick past all kinds of references to magic in order to get to any actual points. Laura was clearly incredibly intelligent, but a product of her culture nonetheless. It did seem that the "mages" being on board with her project gave her some peace of mind, though, so at least the end result was good.    
  
"Well, congratulations on your success with that. Friends in Mora are already crowing about how much it's going to bring the price of wool down."  
  
Laura seemed very satisfied by this compliment, adding to the train of thought. "Now that we don't have to keep sheep entirely on perfectly cleansed land, I think we can all have several more new pairs of socks a year." The combination of such a bright abstract mind and the simple desire for everyone's feet to be warmer was of a type Siv had encountered in few people. It made Siv think she would end up really liking Laura. The first impression she'd had of Emil's friends being really quite kind and impressive people was only growing.  
  
They all settled in further for the evening, attending to their various tasks. Miri looked up at the way Siv sighed. "Hmm?"  
  
"Oh, nothing, it's just - I do feel a bit bad about all this." Siv had gotten stuck thinking about Emil's chances out there, which she knew wasn't wise. It was a bit much to be sharing about already, but she supposed everyone here could sympathise with the general issue, and they were all incredibly nice.  
  
Miri made a sympathetic face over the knitting she'd picked up after dinner. "Well, it wasn't you that sent him out there."  
  
"Well, no, not this time, but I'm sure having been to the Silent World before made him feel more able to do it. And he barely survived last time." Siv pulled at her sleeve, worrying at the edge as if she could work out the anxiety with her fingers.  
  
Jaana looked up from what she was reading. "What's that got to do with you, though?"  
  
"Well." Siv paused. "I don't know how much Emil ever told you about the time when he met Lalli, but it was on a mission my husband and myself organised, a sort of quick-money book-raiding mission in old Denmark. Honestly, it's a miracle they survived it. I do really feel bad now about how under-supplied we knew they were at the start, and I just worry that now Emil's done that once, he thinks-"  
  
Siv noticed that everyone in the room had started staring at her. She'd certainly been rambling a little, as she tended to do when she was stressed, but the intensity of this was conveying a lot more than a desire for her to be quiet. Siv opened her mouth to speak again, then decided to wait to hear them say something. She had the overwhelming impression that she'd said something terribly wrong. Sini's face was outright hostile.  
  
"A quick-money mission." Jaana repeated her phrase back to her with a flat tone.  
  
"Mm." Siv tensed, waiting for what was coming next.  
  
"Tuuri seemed to think it was something different to that." Jaana's voice was very tight.  
  
Sini got up, said something in Finnish and headed upstairs. Siv took a deep breath in and out. She didn't know how she'd failed to think about this possibility. Emil hadn't mentioned this, but then, why would he? There was nothing to be gained by saying that the people he'd moved in with had known Tuuri. Tactless he might be sometimes, but he wasn't the type to needlessly visit guilt on people. Siv supposed it made sense that he'd never talked about the details of the mission to these people either, if it was such a painful subject for them.  
  
"I think I'm going to bed too." Jaana stood and picked a lamp from the little row of them on the wall, taking it and her reading upstairs.  
  
"Mm." Laura was avoiding Siv's gaze as she also departed towards her room.  
  
"I'll see you in the morning." Miri was quiet as she also excused herself, leaving Siv alone in the kitchen, feeling profounly guilty and awkward.  
  
Well, it was late. Siv supposed she might as well go to bed too. Lying on the still-sheetless, bizarrely stuffed mattress, she contemplated this new spin on the situation. It was still unclear to her how much guilt she should feel for any of this. Yes, she'd been beating herself up for how she might have helped make this sort of thing seem normal to Emil, but she really usually managed to not let the old mission disturb her too much.  
  
Now that she was a little removed from the guilt-tripping stares, she could admit that it had been two years at this point, and it made sense it wasn't really on her mind. She'd barely known her, after all. Tuuri had gone of her own free will, a consenting adult who knew full well what the consequences might be. It was tragic, but it wasn't as if Siv had misled her on any relevant factors of the mission. These points were all very logical, and of course had no purchase on her emotional state at all.  
  
Sleeping was very difficult. The looks she'd been given at her unknowing admission were drilling into her mind. Somehow, she managed to convince herself this would all be better dealt with in the morning. Still, when sleep came it wasn't very peaceful.


	31. Chapter 31

Onni leaned against the pile of logs lining the wall. He was staring blearily at the farmer who'd led him and the others there. He desperately needed to sleep, but he felt he owed at least an explanation first to the one whose house he was staying near. After standing in the door to hear the bare bones of the situation, the man - short, stocky, and introducing himself as Jarkko - had held up a hand, put on his boots and coat and come outside, shutting the door behind him.  
  
"I'm immune, my wife isn't. Explain in the woodshed."  
  
Now they were all inside, Jarkko sitting on the chopping block. Emil had flopped down on the floor, leaning against the wall. Lalli had taken the first chance to go to sleep. He had sat down as well, pulled his hood over his eyes and immediately dozed off on Emil's shoulder. Onni didn't blame him. Jarkko was looking between them all, taking in Lalli's and Emil's exhaustion, Onni's bleariness and Vasiliy's wide-eyed staring.  
  
"So you've been walking in the Silent World."  
  
Onni nodded. "For almost two months, I think. I've lost track. Do you know what the date is today?"  
  
Jarkko was thinking about it. "January... January. The tenth, or fifteenth, maybe. Something like that." Onni remembered now that the exact calendar date tended to matter less and less, the further you got from Keuruu. Well, they'd find out soon enough.  
  
Onni tried to work out how to recap what had happened to them. "There was a military mission that went wrong, and we needed to mount a rescue. We picked up this one while we were out there." He indicated Vasiliy with a nod. "We've been walking all night, so if we could rest here before we make our way back to Keuruu, we would be grateful."  
  
"Yes, yes, of course. And you need to eat."  
  
"We have some of our own food."  
  
"Alright then." Jarkko was mulling over the day he was going to have. "Wait, and where did you come from, then?" He was addressing Vasiliy now, who had been staring tiredly at the wall and jerked at noticing someone was addressing him.  
  
"He doesn't speak Finnish." Onni realised he wasn't actually totally sure what the name of the settlement Vasiliy had come from was. "Or Icelandic, or any other language of the Known World."  
  
Jarkko looked concerned. "So what is he?"  
  
"Russian, I believe."  
  
Jarkko's eyebrows went up and his stance shifted a little. "And he's friendly?"  
  
Onni thought he knew what Jarkko might be getting at. He did know his own family history, and remembered perfectly well that paranoia about Russian aggression was most of the reason the Hotakainens had possessed a huge stash of food and an escape plan. He was shaky on whatever history had merited it, as his knowledge of the past mostly focused on the various gods people had worshipped throughout the Known World. He had been really quite sure that knowing exactly who "Russians" had been would never be relevant to his life.  
  
Based on the few explicit conversations he'd ever heard about those early days, though, he suspected the majority of Finland's population today owed their lives to their ancestors having this specific reason to prepare for disaster. Belief in the danger had seemingly been widespread, so it was not at all unlikely that Jarkko's great-grandparents had a similar story to his own.  
  
"His village fed us when we passed it, and helped us across the lake they live on. They seemed like reasonable enough people, and this one came with us as a guide."  
  
"Well then. A whole village of them." Jarkko was still looking at Vasiliy. "I had no idea anyone lived that far east."  
  
"You're the first Finn besides us to learn about it." Jarkko seemed ambivalent to the fact, making only a "fancy that" expression before standing up.  
  
"Well, feel free to sleep here. Do you need food?"  
  
"I think we have a little of our own, still. Thank you."  
  
Pitching their tents in a confined space felt a little strange, but it was warmer than lying on the floor of the woodshed. Emil woke Lalli up for just long enough to get him inside and wrapped up a bit.  
  
"Vasiliy's setting up his tent too." Emil looked concerned. "I think he's planning on following us further."  
  
Onni wasn't sure what to make of this. It was true that establishing contact with another people was something you should usually tell someone about. Things like this had been quite far from his mind, but now he was in relative safety, it was worth thinking about. He knew contact wasn't necessarily always as fruitful as that between the nations of the Nordic Council. Of course, there had been no other official contact with non-Nordic nations before this, but he had known for a long time that the northern wilds had sheltered more people from the Rash than the Icelandic skalds counted in their lists.  
  
In the times before he'd totally walled his dreams off and stopped wandering, he had once met a foreign mage. She had carried a huge skin drum and worn brightly woven straps among her covering of pelts, not quite alien in the way the Icelanders were, but certainly not a Finn either. When he had been shocked, she had told him that yes, her people were aware of at least the Norwegian government, but didn't feel contact would be productive. Onni had always kept it to himself, quite sure that he wasn't the only mage doing so.  
  
This Russian, though, was clearly much keener on finding out about other nations. Onni supposed this new contact was going to be shared with the world, and making it happen was going to fall on them. It would be a huge task, compounded by the fact there was no mutual language here at all. At least when outside contact had been first established with Swedish survivors, there had still been some language skills remaining in common, as well as a bizarrely large amount of barely-touched Swedish studybooks left over from the old world. Onni didn't know how this was going to work, or what this would mean for the Nordic Council.  
  
That was a topic for several days in the future, though. Now, he could sleep, and he did until late enough in the afternoon that the light was already fading. Jarkko came out again once he saw them milling around the entrance to the woodshed. "I know you have some food, but my wife insisted you have some of these. She doesn't like the idea of you having been walking out there for so long." The plate he was holding out made Onni feel very suddenly like he really had made it home. The little oval-shaped pies were filled to the brim with barley porridge and topped with enough egg butter to make Onni's mouth water.  
  
"Thank you. Tell her we're very grateful." Onni bit into a pie, feeling the crisp shell crunch lightly in his teeth and the porridge burn the top of his mouth a little, almost ready to weep at the familiarity of it. Emil was happy too, even more than Lalli. "These are just as good as Miri's. Wow, I really can't wait to get back to Keuruu, I'd forgotten how good fresh baking was." Vasiliy just took a pie and ate it in silence.  
  
Jarkko was peering at Emil. "Never heard your dialect before. Where's that from?"  
  
"Oh, um." Emil was talking through a mouthful of pie. "I'm Swedish."  
  
"Huh. Always heard you lot were taller. So are you all staying the night here, or moving on?"  
  
Onni spoke. "We should get going. We appreciate the hospitality you've offered. I'll sing a runo for your barley." It would be dark now, but they were on far safer land than they had been. There was a quarantine facility on the other side of Saimaa and it would be wise to skirt around the edges of any real settlements until they'd been thoroughly checked there. While Onni had kept his breath mask on right up to the point where they reached Jarkko's farmhouse, there would always still be a chance he was carrying something.  
  
"So, Saimaa is the biggest town in Finland, right?" Emil was walking alongside Onni, carrying the lamp again.  
  
"It's not a town in the sense that Mora is. Most people live there, yes, but it's a collection of islands and villages."  
  
"Are any of them bigger than Keuruu?"  
  
"Not that I'm aware of."  
  
"Huh."  
  
Lalli interjected. "Most of them are a more sensible size. No streets."  
  
Emil never got to see exactly the kind of size Lalli meant, because they crossed Saimaa without running into any real settlement. Vasiliy kept following them, staring at every minor sign of civilisation they encountered. Onni hoped Vasiliy would understand what the quarantine they were about to go through was, reassuring himself that the village he'd come from clearly employed the concept and he could probably guess. They did camp for a short sleep overnight, setting off before dawn the next morning to try to catch any morning boats that might take them. Onni felt a slight tightness in his chest as he saw the sun rise over Saimaa during the start of their crossing.  
  
Before this journey, it had been over a decade since he'd gotten to watch this over any truly open space, and now he was seeing it over the islands of his childhood. The silhouette of trees and rocks in the early light, the way their reflections changed as the sun gained strength, these were all things he remembered well but had failed to realise he missed. The magic of dawn's grey fingers was a little ruined by the sound of Lalli, who at the first sign of movement rushed to the side of the boat and hung half of his body over it to throw up. The sound of Emil casually making soothing noises at Lalli while he used one hand to rub his back drifted over. It mixed with the light smack of water on hull as they crossed the water. Vasiliy was just leaning on the other side, watching the two of them interact and looking faintly puzzled.  
  
Onni just watched the ice of the half-frozen lake crack against the sides of the boat that was taking them to quarantine, suddenly realising that soon, he would be back to a life entirely within city walls. It would be safe again, the routine he'd built likely returning and his familiar habits able to be resumed. On the shores of the lake, forest grew and called to him. It made the prospect of actually getting home seem far more bittersweet than he'd expected. As hard as it had been out there, it had been his first experience in the woods as a mature mage, and the growth he had felt within himself was something he craved more of. Once he was back in Keuruu, contamination protocol would determine he stayed inside or faced quarantine on a regular basis, which nobody had the time for.    
  
"Emil. Are you two going to go ahead?" Onni remembered it wouldn't be necessary to detain them here for two weeks, given they were immune.  
  
Emil looked up. "I don't know. Do we have to?"  
  
"There's bunks in shared rooms for anyone traveling with someone who needs quarantine, if I remember right." And if nothing had changed in thirteen years.  
  
Emil looked down at Lalli questioningly, then decided to answer himself when he got no response. "Well, if they're quarantining you and Vasiliy, I think it would feel weird to abandon you now, and he won't know where we went. I could send a letter on, maybe."  
  
"You probably should. I guess we have a plan, then." Onni appreciated the fact that the two of them didn't want to abandon him, despite the fact they must surely have wanted to go home rather than staying in a shared dorm for two more weeks. He hadn't totally missed the looks they'd started giving each other once Lalli had recovered a little from his ordeal, and did suspect they were after some alone time. It did feel right to him, though, that after such a long journey they came home as a unit. While he hadn't put much stock in Emil's opinion prior to this journey, knowing Emil reciprocated that feeling of bonding was touching. Onni hadn't noticed it happening, but once he considered it, he realised that the way he valued Emil now had nothing in common with the way he'd looked at him before.  
  
The morning mist finished clearing as the sun reached its high point. Onni thought that perhaps they were starting to actually get past the grimness of the time around the solstice. They really had been gone quite a while. The boat finally thudded against the dock near the quarantine facility, and the four of them were ushered forwards for the final stage of re-entering civilisation.


	32. Chapter 32

Siv had come downstairs the next morning after she heard most of them abandon breakfast and leave, her bags still in Emil's room but packed. She really couldn't see how she could come back from the blunder she'd made last night. Given that her stay here really was indefinite, it seemed impossibly rude to keep insisting on it.  
  
"Of course not." Jaana had still been in the kitchen and dismissed her attempts to leave with a wave of her hand, casual and half occupied with wiping down the counter. She seemed much more together than she'd been before excusing herself the night before. When Siv had kept standing there awkwardly, Jaana had continued. "We told you when you arrived that we know it's awful having someone out there, and not even being able to get the fastest news."  
  
Siv did remember that. The significance of it was suddenly much clearer, and very guilt-inducing.  
  
"We wouldn't inflict that on you." Jaana finished wiping and looked up, meeting Siv's eyes with total directness. "Nobody deserves that."  
  
The passive-aggression didn't miss its mark. Siv felt the sting with a lurch of guilt.  
  
"You know, the mission wasn't entirely about the money." Siv blurted it out. It wasn't the situation to be whipping out comebacks, much less weak ones like that, but she'd spent half the night wishing she would have the chance to say this. It was true, and she wanted them to know.  
  
Jaana leaned against her freshly cleaned counter, her expression hardening as she placed her free hand on her hip. "Just mostly."  
  
"We wouldn't have done it without a financial incentive, I admit that." Siv deflated from her self-defence very fast.  
  
"And you sent your own nephew out too, despite knowing it was under-resourced." Jaana wasn't pulling any punches.  
  
"If nothing else, isn't that proof we expected it to go much better?"  
  
"Or proof you're even lower than you sounded at first. I assume going yourself was out of the question."  
  
Siv didn't have a response to that, avoiding Jaana's eye contact and fiddling with her clothes. "I really can leave."  
  
"No, no, no." Jaana was returning to the tidying. "No. You should stay here. As I said, I wouldn't wish this kind of worry on anyone. When Emil gets back, I'll be happy to see you know about it sooner rather than later." Siv wondered how much of this was genuine compassion, and how much was some kind of ploy to keep her around and test her for whatever character flaws were being ascribed to her. She'd appraised Jaana as being certainly witty, but still on the blunt side, and assumed the latter part was the product of some mild social ineptness. The way she'd laid in now, wrapping up unrecoverable hits in a show of goodness Siv couldn't argue in the face of, was unexpectedly precise and clear. Siv had clearly misread how intentional she was in her approach to people.  
  
It occurred to Siv that one phrase had gone conspicuously unsaid so far. "Jaana, I'm sorry."  
  
Jaana was looking at her, waiting for Siv to meet her gaze. She met and held it for a moment, which stretched for no longer or shorter than it took Siv to inhale and exhale.  
  
"Well, I believe you. That's something." Jaana looked at the clock. "I'll follow the others to work now. It would be helpful if you could make dinner. You remember what ingredients you brought home yesterday, surprise us."  
  
Siv had no doubt that at work, this conversation would be picked over by all four of them. Her book wasn't as entertaining today, but kept her occupied until the early afternoon, which she then spent wandering around the house and going through the cupboards to find where they kept their kitchen things. Trying to properly tidy the room she was sleeping in seemed fruitless - Emil always claimed he couldn't find his things any more if you tried to do that for him, anyway - but she picked up some obviously dirty laundry.  
  
They didn't seem to mind her cooking, even if it wasn't as good as what she would have made in her own kitchen. It was curious, how being out of your element and missing your familiar tools made such routine skills suffer the most. They didn't mention anything about Jaana and Siv's conversation that morning, but had clearly discussed her in some capacity, as they were full of ideas about how she could occupy her time while she waited.  
  
"Sini said she spoke some Icelandic to you. Is your Icelandic good?" Laura was businesslike. Sini still hadn't said a word to Siv herself, and was making her contributions to the conversation in Finnish.  
  
"It's not bad."  
  
"Give me a real assessment."  
  
"Alright, it's very good, I'm told nearly flawless." In Sweden it wouldn't have been particularly impressive, but from Siv's conversations so far with the people in Keuruu, she guessed it was easily above average for here. People seemed able to communicate well enough, but their expression lacked any real elegance. Based on a few aspects of Emil's complaining when he'd started learning Finnish, she guessed there were marked differences between the languages that did make the barrier higher.  
  
"Good. We have some records of old collaborations that were kept in Swedish and which are no problem for us, but may be for anyone else who does our job later and has only learned the standard Icelandic. We've had no time to translate them."  
  
Siv nodded. It sounded tedious, but was certainly something she could do, and did do for the next several days. The pile of documents slowly grew shorter, and on the second morning after Siv had put her foot in it, Sini greeted her at breakfast in Swedish. No further mention was made of what she'd admitted to. Siv got the impression that there was nothing further expected from her, after what she'd communicated to Jaana and assumed had been described to the others. It wasn't a satisfying conclusion, per se, but it seemed they'd reached a reasonable peace.  
  
They still all spoke as if it was certain that Emil had been recently confirmed to be on his way back. One evening, a woman came over who introduced herself as Sanna, and Siv learned that the "mage" who had told them all she'd met Onni in a dream was also Laura's girlfriend. The fact Laura trusted to the reports of dream wanderings despite her clear intelligence seemed to make a little more sense. If Sanna was insisting she had magic powers, the way Laura acted towards her didn't speak of an inclination to disagree.  
  
Siv did always wonder exactly what went through the mind of people who claimed to be able to do magic. It made some sense to her how someone might come to believe in others doing it; growing up with various phenomena ascribed to magic, and a culture where taking "mages" at their word was the done thing, would make there seem to be proof everywhere. She didn't understand, though, how a reasonable person could continue to be a source of such nonsense. Of course, she'd understood the concept of cognitive dissonance, understanding full well how an egoistic person might employ it to maintain their self-image. She also knew that various mental illnesses made one prone to hearing voices and imagining the world to run according to a special plan.  
  
She'd had her suspicions about Onni being the latter sort of "mage", as he'd clearly also posessed some anxiety and paranoia about letting people get too close to his thoughts, as well as having fairly intense mood swings and strange seizure-like absences. He did appear to hold down a routine perfectly well and exhibit other signs of mental stability, but then, the symptoms of these things were often so mixed. It certainly seemed more likely than him having some agenda with it, because while Onni certainly wasn't the most easily relatable person, Siv had never pegged him as unusually self-interested. She had never been able to get a real read on Lalli with the total language barrier, but did suspect he wasn't entirely mentally standard either, and these things ran in families in much the same way "magic" was held to.  
  
Sanna did seem reasonably well-adjusted, and not particularly egoistic. Siv supposed there was some cultural element that made it just much easier to convince oneself of these things. She concluded that Sanna did seem extremely eager to please people, and that being assured all your life that such "abilities" helped others might well cause such a person to invent some. Hopefully Emil hadn't gotten too deep into this whole set of beliefs. The topic had been dutifully and notably avoided in his letters. Siv knew better by now than to betray any of these thoughts, concentrating on asking more about Laura's sheep and Sanna's ideas about them. Sanna was tentatively of the opinion that Laura's full-time sheep dreams didn't sound too bad, which was a pleasant enough topic.  
  
The stack of documents reached their end. Siv had been here five days, and couldn't decide if it felt like it had been longer or shorter than that. She cleaned the house top to bottom and waited for them to come up with another task that might fill the time she was present. Nobody suggested she leave. Siv learned how the communal laundry worked, dressed Emil's lumpy bed with clean sheets, and got used to sleeping in it. Miri gently told her that she didn't need to justify every second of being here, because waiting for Emil was a real reason.  
  
A week after Siv had arrived, a letter came, addressed to Jaana. Siv and Jaana had been alone together in the kitchen, the others away on their various errands of the early evening. Jaana whooped for joy at the name on the sender's side and ripped it open to confirm details. "He's made it to Saimaa!"  
  
"Emil has?" Siv had been washing up when the mail came in. She began frantically wiping her hands dry so she could take the letter.  
  
"Oh, Siv, don't bother, it's in Finnish - wait, no, he switches over halfway through when he remembers he's not talking to Lalli and Onni anymore - let me properly read the first page though, this is kind of long."  
  
Siv looked over Jaana's shoulder as she loosely translated the first page, unable to glean anything at all from the cloud of double vowels and compound words scrawled on the page. "So they arrived in the quarantine centre in Saimaa today, and they're staying together so Onni doesn't have to come back here with just - hang on. I'm sure he doesn't _mean_ 'we found a Russian and brought him home', but that's what he's _saying_."  
  
"Still a bit shaky with his Finnish, then?" Well, he'd gotten further than Siv had expected him to at first, I think.  
  
"Well, no actually, that's the thing." Jaana flipped over to the mostly-Swedish side, and Siv could see that he was continuing his earlier thoughts still very clearly claiming they had a Russian man in tow who spoke nothing but Russian. He ended the letter thanking them for sending someone looking for them, saying that Onni had told them Sanna had visited looking for news. Out of the bizarre congruence of the two parties' dream stories and the claim of surprise contact with another surviving nation, Siv didn't know which to try to process first.  
  
Jaana made the decision for her. "I think he expects me to know what to do about the Russian. So, now we know they're coming home in two weeks, I guess we have a lot of work to do."  
  
Siv didn't have many suggestions to offer. The last time a major contact event had happened, she hadn't even been born. She knew enough history to be sure Russia had been quite a large country and that the Russian language had been big in the old world, but it and all its speakers had been presumed dead for 90 years now.  
  
"I'll have to get a slot on the radio to see if we can locate anyone. Maybe several slots. If I tell them why, there's even a chance of that taking less than two weeks."  
  
"Would anyone in the Known World speak Russian?" Siv didn't have high hopes.  
  
"I remember once we got an issue of an Icelandic periodical that had an ad in it, it looked like it was for some sort of dead languages society. Oh, and Danes with a niche interest, maybe, aren't they obsessed with preserving old-world stuff?" Jaana was clearly thinking hard. "Mm. We'll work something out." She looked like she was settling in for a huge effort, but not displeased about the fact. "I can't believe that I have even more good news than we expected when the others get home."


	33. Chapter 33

Jaana had thought very carefully about how to proceed. Strictly speaking, the correct thing to do would be to immediately bring this news to the highest authority possible. However, after skimming the letter for practical details, the reread had revealed a few things that made her hesitate. Emil, Lalli and Onni were not in the best shape, and Jaana was very sure that if their arrival was announced ahead of time, they would have no time at all to rest before they were rushed in to have all information squeezed out of them. It would all be well within what duty called for, but Jaana wasn't Lalli, and had her own ideas about how immediately one should obey such calls.  
  
However, she did absolutely need priority on that radio, if she was going to deal with the issue of the Russian. Boats from Saimaa only came every couple of days, so it wouldn't be at all hard to guess which they were coming on with. Quarantine times were absolutely standardised, and the time the letter had taken to get here would have been either three or four days, so with their two-day journey from Saimaa - if they were announced as on their way back now, they'd be expected in just under two weeks. Jaana noticed that Emil hadn't actually dated his letter, and unlike the ones that came from Sweden, letters within Finland tended not to receive regular stamps indicating which ship they'd come on. The lax attitude of the Finnish postal service was, for once, ideal. She made the decision to give them all just slightly more time than that before the questioning started.  
  
There was something else she could do in the meantime. Luckily, she had keys to most of the stashes of books in Keuruu, and knew exactly where the one she wanted might be kept. She hadn't actually looked inside this box before; such books were incredibly precious here, preserved only due to those rare early survivors who had kept wondering for their whole lives about the rest of the world's fate. Their use was to be strictly in case of such unlikely events as this. The archive was under Virpi's office, but Jaana went long before the dawn, feeling slightly pleased at the image of herself digging around with a lamp in secret. The books in the box were the only source she knew of from which she might learn various languages that had been spoken in the Old World.  
  
Several volumes were dedicated to _englanti_ , with _saksa_ , _ranska_ and _kiina_ also having multiples. Jaana handled them all with absolute delicacy. Underneath one book about _arabia_ , she finally found what she was looking for. _Venäjä_ , several numbered volumes. Holding the opening pages of the first book up to her lamplight, she saw that this language would be in a script she didn't know. She'd encountered strange new letters in Icelandic and not found them a huge challenge, but this would be different, starting to learn to read again from scratch. It was annoying, but didn't seem impossible. Placing the other books back into their box in the order she'd found them, she tucked the Russian language textbook under her arm and hurried home with it. She would start immediately after work.  
  
Siv fretted over her as she sat making flashcards to teach herself the new letters. "It's late. You really shouldn't be stressing yourself out this much."  
  
"It's fine. I'm going to bed after this." Jaana suspected Siv was more concerned for the baby than Jaana herself. She assumed that if she didn't actually feel particularly stressed, a little extra work on her side wouldn't do it real harm.  
  
Siv took her word for it and went back to anxiously cleaning the kitchen. It and the rest of the house had become absolutely spotless in the time since she'd arrived. Jaana wasn't sure how she felt about what seemed like an attempt to appease them all. Apologies had already been offered, and trying to force them to stick seemed well out of Siv's lane, but then, it wasn't like she had a huge amount of other things to do in their house. Maybe this was just how Siv was. She'd even tried to clean Emil's room, attempting to clear any obvious trash out of it "just so it's a bit nicer for him when he comes back", then giving up when Miri told her she was pretty sure most of it had sentimental value of some kind. Siv did smile when she was told the sloppily painted pine cone on his windowsill was from Viivi, but remained puzzled by half the stuff he kept strewn around.  
  
Jaana did understand Siv's bafflement at Emil's chaotic hoarding. Based on how much Emil had improved in the past year, Jaana was sure that when he'd lived under Siv's roof, his habits had been even messier. It was no wonder Siv still had the instinct to resignedly clean up after him, although Jaana was relieved that she had decided to leave it be eventually. She had no idea herself what significance items like the box of withered plants had, but Emil had brought it with him when he moved in, so perhaps it was important. Everyone decided to assume he still had some use for the labels on them. Siv had rightly pointed out that there wasn't even any way to tell what half the labels referred to anymore, but put it back where she'd found it.  
  
Three days after she'd actually received the letter, when another ship from Saimaa had come and gone, Jaana had gone to Virpi and done her best wide-eyed impression of only having found out the night before. Virpi had agreed immediately to kick some people off their radio slots. She showed no excitement, only a grave determination to make sure this went as smoothly as possible. Seeing Virpi's total seriousness about the matter did make Jaana wonder if she should be more worried, but the situation seemed under control so far. It became a little more worrying the next day, when a radio call to Iceland and call back the same day yielded no hint of someone who might help them communicate.  
  
Apparently their dead languages society focused almost entirely on older forms of the Scandinavian languages, serving mostly to glorify the Old Norse that their own tongue still closely resembled. The idea of discussing things that were no longer evidenced in the Known World was completely outside their remit. Given what Jaana had heard Icelanders - well, at least one Icelander she'd spent a lot of time nodding and smiling at - say about the "unhealthiness" of fixating on the old world, it did make sense. She just hoped the constant cracks about "unhealthy Danish obsessions" and her own knowledge of the nation's priorities were based on truth. The fact nobody in Iceland could help at all was a serious blow to her hopes, and Virpi's intense stress about the situation was getting contagious.  
  
It was two more days before they could arrange a call with Bornholm. Jaana hadn't been present for it, but was told that they'd be getting a call back in two more days, after some promised attempt to locate someone who might help. It hadn't sounded like a very clear plan on the Danish end, and Virpi was very unhappy about it. "Apparently somebody knows somebody else who constantly complains about something to do with this, and it somehow points to a person we might want, and they can't explain if this person is some kind of expert or not. I don't have high hopes for this, to be honest. Go down there, though, and see what this friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend has to say. It wasn't confirmed whether the person calling us back will speak Icelandic, and we don't have any Danish speakers here, so your Swedish will perhaps have to do." Jaana thought it seemed unlikely that anyone would be an "expert" on this exactly, so just noted down the radio appointment time, unsure what to expect.  
  
It was now only a couple of days before Jaana expected everyone back, and less than a week before everyone else did. The radio room was quiet as the call came in, Jaana placing her headphones on with faint excitement at getting to use the equipment herself. Hopefully, if she did have to understand Danish, it wasn't as bad as Emil always claimed. At first all she could hear was static, fairly plain with the odd distressing hiss for help caught in the waves, but then a male voice came through, speaking very reasonable Icelandic. "Bornholm to Keuruu, is anyone there?"  
  
"You've reached Keuruu." Jaana wondered if this was the person who'd be helping them, then guessed it wouldn't be when the man seemed to lean away from the microphone and call behind him. Jaana heard something that, had she thought she was listening to very slurred Swedish, she might have guessed was "Tine, come here, we're connected!"  
  
  
  
There was the faint shuffling of chair and headphones being exchanged, then a female voice came through, sounding quite young and a little nervous but still speaking clear Icelandic. "Hello, this is Tine Thomsen speaking, um, how's it going?"  
  
"Jaana Hassan. We were told you might help with a problem we have. What we need is someone who speaks Russian."  
  
"Oh!" Tine's nervousness transformed immediately into excitement. "Oh, yes, I know Russian! Do you need something translated? If you send something over, I can translate it right away! What kind of document is it? I just wonder because-"  
  
"No documents. I said speak, not read. A mission to the east of Finland found a survivor."  
  
Jaana heard Tine go quiet, then through the static and faint howling of the radio background, managed to discern that she had started hyperventilating. She waited as she heard footsteps in the room behind Tine, then a muffled voice in the background imploring her to calm down. Tine was taking deep, slow breaths and finally spoke again.  
  
"Okay. Okay, I'm fine. Did you really say there are Russians out there, alive?"  
  
"At least one. He's on his way to Keuruu and apparently speaks nothing but Russian, and we need someone to communicate with him."  
  
"Oh, oh my god."  
  
Jaana didn't want to wait several more minutes while Tine got excited again, so pressed on, hoping to work out if the language skills professed would actually be useful. "Can you explain what your history is with this?"  
  
"Well." Tine took a deep breath. "It all started when I went on a walk with the local history society, looking at monuments from the occupation of Bornholm about 70 years before the Rash..."  
  
Jaana slightly regretted her open phrasing. Tine's history of becoming more and more obsessed with a specific chapter of the old-world history of her island, eventually becoming fixated on the culture of those responsible for it, might have been interesting in a different context but wasn't what she was here to learn about.  
  
"... but I can't do that anymore, because now the local history society has a rule saying 'all presentations must be both in a living language and shorter than 70 minutes', and they claim it's not just because of me, but - Oh! But now we know there are living Russians! I guess as long as I cut them down it's technically within the rules again-"  
  
"So you have been actually speaking it." Jaana interrupted Tine's rambling, relieved to have finally stumbled across the point.  
  
"Uhhhm." Tine stammered as she came to a halt. "I mean, I don't - there aren't many recordings, and I think I've heard every one on Bornholm and even a few I managed to request from Mora, but I don't know if my accent is very-"  
  
"Are you able to come to Finland?"  
  
Tine gasped. "Oh, I don't know."  
  
"The Nordic Council has been alerted to the situation and would likely help you with transport." Jaana was sure that was true. Virpi's communications with them so far had seemed to have a real air of urgency, so surely this would be a situation where they made sure the translator got on the boat.  
  
"I've never left Denmark. I live on a dairy farm."  
  
"Tine, you might be the only person in the Known World who can help us with this." That was the cue for another brief spot of heavy breathing, but Tine caught herself without help this time. When she returned to the conversation, she was again nervous, but clearly determined to help.  
  
"Okay. It's colder in Finland, right? Do I need to get a bigger coat?"  
  
Jaana wondered how it felt to nurture such a niche interest for a decade, finding very few people willing to listen to you talk about it, and then receive a call like this. Although mostly occupied with the relief of this situation suddenly becoming much easier, Jaana reflected that this might have been the strangest and best day of Tine's life so far. After taking off her headphones and relaying that the situation was resolved to the rest of the room, Jaana put them back on and told Tine she would be talking to some logistics people soon, before standing up so that could happen.  
  
Jaana's part in this was done for now. It was time to get ready and make sure her friends had one evening of peace before their arrival back was detected. The knowledge of this hadn't spread far yet, so it was still more of a frantic, furtive logistical scramble than a public event. Now that the excitement was finally hitting, she was even more glad that she'd hopefully arranged them a few hours to breathe. Once the news of outside contact hit real momentum, all three of them might well be answering questions till spring.


	34. Chapter 34

Vasya had been put in a room by himself, and Onni had as well. Emil and Lalli had been led off to some room shared with many others, and Vasya was extremely jealous of the fact they were going to have company for these two weeks. He thought he had been lonely having nobody to talk to before this, but at least Emil had been prattling away at him and making some kind of effort to communicate. Now, he was extremely stuck and starting to realise that he really hadn't thought this through.  
  
He'd pondered on how far to follow them for the whole time they'd trekked through the land he knew, eventually deciding that based on his supplies, he'd follow them for at most two days more than he'd strictly been ordered to. He was curious, but not curious enough to risk going back through too much danger. The wolf attack had been a bizarre experience. Onni's magic was both terrifying and intriguing. When only a day's further walk had left them climbing a fence, he'd been shocked. Lalli's estimate of how close the other country had been was totally correct. Vasya had thrown his gun over in preparation to climb and made to follow them almost without thinking, grateful for it when Emil decided to help him over. Perhaps ending the battle with the wolves had made these three want to keep him around.  
  
The first new person they'd met here had seemed friendly enough, trying to address Vasya before being headed off by Onni. It was still incredibly strange not to be able to voice his thoughts to anybody, but Vasya had been out by himself for a lot of his life, and this was more company than he usually worked with. Shelter and pies were more than enough to feel like human connection was happening. The further walking and boat ride the next day had all been somehow different to how it would have happened in Russia, which was exciting, but once on the boat he started to feel an awareness that was very worrying. If he wanted to turn around and find a boat back by himself, he wouldn't be able to actually communicate where he wanted to go.  
  
The point where he should have turned back was probably about three stages ago, and he was now lost in a foreign land with no idea what his companions expected.  
  
Quarantining was at least something he understood. Vasya could guess that the reason he'd been left by himself was due to concerns about his immunity. He didn't know if these people would just believe he was immune, even if he had been able to say so. At least they treated him well, and Emil did come by and poke a head inside his door, making thumbs-up-thumbs-down gestures with a questioning face. Emil definitely felt bad for him, alone and able to communicate only in the vaguest gestures. Lalli sometimes followed, his expression hard to discern. Vasya wondered if any of them had experienced such isolation before, unable to speak to the people around them. It was uniquely horrible, and Vasya started to spend most of his time only hoping that they didn't quarantine people for longer than two weeks here.  
  
Emil brought him paper and pencils, which Vasya tried to journal on, but he'd never been the writing type. Putting words on the page just reminded him that nobody here could read what he wrote. Three days after that, Lalli brought him a knife and some wood, miming the act of carving. Vasya had never learned to do this, but Lalli pressed them into his hands despite the shrugging. Perhaps that was his show of sympathy. Without being able to ask, his face would remain forever difficult to read. Vasya sat in his room, experimenting with the materials he'd been given, finding it did help a little bit to occupy his hands. By the end of the week, he had a row of little animals depicted with slowly increasing skill, and when Lalli visited again he nodded at them. _"Hyvää."_  
  
_"Hyvää?"_ Vasya wasn't sure what was meant by this. Lalli's monotone didn't give him much to go on.  
  
Emil stood on his tiptoes, resting his arms on Lalli's shouders as he leaned over to also speak past the door. _"Joo, hyvää työtä!"_ The phrase was accompanied by a few positive gestures and a cheesy smile, while Lalli looked at the arms waving besides his ears with the same quiet face he always did. Despite Lalli's general reservation, he didn't seem to mind this. Vasya remembered he'd been told Onni's wish was "to take his family home", so presumed all three of them were related somehow. That would explain how close these two seemed. The fact they were trying to work together to make this easier for him was nice, even if there wasn't much they could actually do to help.  
  
The days passed incredibly slowly. Vasya tried to remember everything he thought he'd discerned the meaning of, starting to panic about his complete inability to say so when he wanted to go home. By now, they would be expecting him back, but he'd given up on managing that in time. Lateness home could be resolved. The fact he had no idea if he'd ever be sent home, though, was horrifying. The paper and pencil saw some use as he tried to approximate the words he'd heard, but when he showed Emil his writing and attempted a questioning " _hyvää?_ ", Emil just looked at the letters as if he couldn't even read them.  
  
Vasya realised with a start that he'd never seen writing here using any kind of familiar letters, and started to go through everything in his room that was written on, checking for things he might be able to even sound out. There was nothing. Although some letters looked the same, or much like reverse forms of normal letters, as a system they just didn't seem usable. He hadn't known that other languages might be written differently as well. Realising there were kinds of difference he hadn't even contemplated left him sitting on his bed, feeling like he had made a bigger mistake than he could process.  
  
Finally, the time came to leave quarantine. Vasya kept following Lalli, Emil and Onni, because at this point there was nothing else to do. Once they were on a boat again, the hopelessness of quarantine seemed more distant. At least they were in the fresh air again for a little bit, and there were three people he had walked and worked with traveling with him. Onni had just had his own two weeks of isolation and gazed off the side of the boat as if he'd never see the view again. The ice along the boat's path was thankfully still not thick enough to stop the boat breaking it. When they changed over into a larger boat with no openness to the air, Vasya saw people at work near the docks, smashing the path where boats would come in clear.  
  
The closed boat took a long time. It was an even longer trip than crossing the lake at home, which wouldn't have taken more than a morning and afternoon. Emil tried to see if he and Vasya could work out a card game in common, trying to demonstrate a few with Onni. Eventually, they settled on just playing "snap", which had little room for miscommunication. It got boring fairly quickly, but it was the closest thing to a conversation that Vasya had experienced in nearly three weeks, so it was very welcome.  
  
The only sounds once everyone had hunkered down for the night were those of cracking ice and the dull hum of the boat's engine. This was now the third time Vasya had seen Lalli on a boat, and he was just as ill as he'd been the first two times. Lalli had pulled his hood over his face then fallen asleep with his head on Emil's lap, his hands balled up into unhappy fists and Emil's coat providing extra weight over him. Emil fell asleep sitting up like that, against the wall with his hand on Lalli's arm. Onni rolled up his cloak and used it to rest his head, and Vasya more or less copied him, stuffing his hat with his gloves for a pillow and lying under his coat. He fell into a patchy sleep on it until the morning.  
  
He expected the boat ride to not take much longer the next day, but it did. Vasya felt quite bad for Lalli by now, but the other two were taking his refusal to eat or do anything but lie on the floor in their stride. The length of boat ride was starting to become very concerning for other reasons, especially given that Vasya couldn't see out the windows. In the place they'd been before, he'd retained some idea of where the boat back might leave from, and how he might make his way back towards the fence he'd crossed. Now, though, it would be many days' walking, through land he would have no hope of recognising.  
  
The total impenetrability of this foreign language meant he would just have to hope someone thought he wanted to go home at some point. Surely, that would be something someone would guess eventually. Even if they spoke and wrote and ate differently, they must know that was a thing people usually wanted to do. Vasya didn't want to doubt that, but then, he hadn't doubted that people would usually write with a normal alphabet, either.  
  
Whatever was going to happen to him, it didn't seem like it would be actually dangerous. Since arriving here, nobody had threatened him or put him in a situation where he might be hurt. If things kept going the way they had, there had to be a chance to leave eventually, and at least it seemed he would definitely have his curiosity satisfied. Vasya decided to try to focus on that curiosity as much as possible. It was profoundly awful realising that his grandma might be thinking her grandson had been lost at an even younger age than her son had been, but worrying endlessly about whether he'd see home again was simply not going to make it any more likely. When he got off this boat, he would take in everything he could. If he ever made it home, this would be a story he could tell until the day he died.  
  
Finally, they reached a dock and everyone started gathering their things. Vasya could see that it was dark outside again, but through the recently-unshuttered windows he could also tell there were lights and houses. It was the first real village he'd encountered since arriving here, perhaps even bigger than Valaam. Three women were waiting on the dock, watching the people leaving intently. When Lalli emerged, they reacted with excitement. Emil jumping to shore next resulted in the oldest of them grabbing him into a hug, which seemed to surprise Emil greatly. Onni beckoned at Vasya to follow him out, so he did. The lamps on the dock were just bright enough for Vasya to see the ice and snow coating it before he put his feet down, and leaving the boat, he was reminded of the sharpness of the night air.  
  
Onni's greeting from the three women wasn't nearly as exuberant as the one they'd given Emil, but they still seemed extremely pleased to see him. Onni was pointing at Vasya, explaining something, and one of the women was following his indication with bright, keen eyes. She was wearing her hood up against the cold, and as they spoke Lalli and Onni also put up their hoods, looking furtive. The woman approached, and Vasya again prepared himself for the awkwardness of understanding nothing.  
  
She spoke, her voice garbling the words almost beyond recognition and her gestures - at herself, indicating numbers with fingers - portraying half her meaning. "Hello. My name - Jaana. I learn Russian, two weeks. You speak slow, thank you."  
  
Vasya's frenzied response was far too fast, exploding out of him with all the frustration of a very lonely three weeks. He was cut off midway through his second sentence by a raised hand and curt "No". Jaana was looking around her in panic, and Vasya realised people were staring at him and his speech. Jaana tried to form another phrase, but resorted to just shushing Vasya and beckoning him along, perhaps not able to express much more than what she had already. Vasya was once again reduced to following the crowd, even more confused about what was going on but with a new spark of hope.


	35. Chapter 35

Siv had listened to Jaana's explanation with some concern. Apparently the plan was to get down to the docks and back with all in tow before anyone noticed they'd arrived. In a place as small as Keuruu, that seemed ambitious, but Jaana was adamant that they should at least try to give them a day or so of peace before the questions started. Siv did see her point, and had gone there with Jaana and Laura, all their hoods up against snow and recognition. It seemed like an utterly ridiculous attempt at anonymity, but Jaana appraised the two unknown others waiting on the docks and was relieved, commenting in a stage whisper that was likely unnecessary given how few people spoke Swedish. "Nobody who lives here full time, I think. We might be fine."  
  
Neither person attempted to speak to them, so perhaps Jaana had the sheer good luck to be right. Then again, there was nothing particularly odd about any of them standing by the docks. Despite being Finland's biggest military operation, Keuruu was nowhere near tightly run enough for anyone being down here at a strange time to be specifically suspicious. The dock saw plenty of civilian use. It just seemed like a bit of a risk, to blatantly disobey the implicit protocol by keeping the promised Russian here unannounced. Siv still had some concerns.  
  
"So, when your administrator - was it Virpi? - when she comes down to the docks in two days and finds them not coming off the boat, but coming from behind her, how are you going to explain that?"  
  
Jaana shrugged. "Honestly, I did not think that part through very well. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess." She pondered for a moment. "Maybe we should take them in tomorrow morning and say they just turned up at the house today late and unexpected. Still nicer than being grilled straight off the boat." Siv agreed that was a slightly better plan than no plan.  
  
The boat approached, its few outside lamps first just a glow through the fog, then its prow a shadow that broke the intermittent gleam of the moon on the lake. Siv realised she'd started hearing its engine some time ago, barely registering it due to the gradualness of its approach. She could hear ice cracking as it slid close to the dock and finally came to a halt, its engine shutting off abruptly enough that the silence rang for a moment. The shutters came up, and the gangplank down, a few people she didn't recognise filing out before a familiar face appeared. Lalli was staggering out of the boat, his hair over his face.  
  
"Lalli!" Jaana ran to him, then pulled back as he lurched onto land with a wobble. _"Voi ei."_ Lalli said something to her that didn't sound very happy, turning back to face the next person coming out of the boat. This face was even more familiar, although Siv was struck immediately by the ways in which it had become less so.  
  
"Emil!" Siv tried not to yell too loudly, but couldn't help but laugh in strange relief at the expression on his face as he saw her. " _Aunt_ _Siv?_ What are you-"  
  
Siv pulled him to her and hugged him, slightly in shock at how normal he sounded despite being so obviously worn and wounded. Jaana and Laura also went in for the hugs, the latter admonishing him with "I can't believe you didn't leave us a proper note, what were you thinking?"  
  
"Um, I mean, I really did think we'd be back a little sooner-"  
  
Siv cut him off, taking him by the shoulders and inspecting him more closely. "Emil, what happened to your face?"  
  
"Oh." Emil looked off to the side. "Honestly, I'm not sure where to start with-"  
  
"Onni!" Laura was looking at the boat's entrance again, and Onni was indeed emerging, the way he blinked at the greeting reminding Siv very much of an owl disturbed in the daytime. Onni beckoned at someone in the boat behind him, and a young man followed him, also looking quite bewildered. Now the three they were waiting for were all stood on the dock, with this newcomer obviously tailing them. The group all shifted to the side as a handful of others continued filing out of the boat.  
  
Onni began to explain something to Jaana, then looked at Siv and sighed, switching into Icelandic. "I see you must have gotten our letter. I assume Emil explained about the Russian."  
  
Jaana followed Onni's gesturing and approached the man. Siv had heard her practicing as best she could from the limited studybook she had, and wondered if it had been any good. Her phrases were obviously halting, but the man responded with a flurry of words in a language Siv was sure she'd never heard. It was very distinct in its foreignness, and a few people looked up at the sound of it. Jaana immediately shushed the man and led them all off the dock as quickly as possible.  
  
"Do we have a name for this man?" Siv asked Onni.  
  
"His name's Vasiliy." Onni was looking around him, then spoke to Laura and Jaana. _"Mihin me ollaan menossa?"_ The two gestured vaguely at him, Jaana replying. _"Odota hetki. Kotiin."_  
  
Once they were clear of the docks and a little distance away from any crowd, Jaana paused to answer him properly. The exchange that ensued included Lalli, Emil, Onni and the two Siv had come with, entirely in Finnish. Jaana stepped back from the conversation halfway through to fill Siv in. "I'm just explaining that we've been a bit sneaky, and that they're likely to have to talk a lot about this the moment people realise they're here, and that we're all going home for tonight to get some peace."  
  
Onni spoke in Icelandic. "I would rather go back to my own place, for now. I think we will all want to sleep soon." He turned to Lalli and Emil, and Siv guessed the words he was speaking were to much the same effect, because Emil stepped forward once he was done, his body language clearly angling towards a hug. Onni started slightly at the move, which made Emil shrink back just as Onni started moving to reciprocate. The two of them eyed each other, halfway towards committing to hugging for a couple of seconds, before moving together. It was brief and included a couple of slightly overpowered back thumps from Onni, whose stoic expression nonetheless faltered a bit. Both of them looked very awkward about it as they pulled apart. Siv was still rather surprised to see such a display of affection between them.    
  
Onni didn't attempt to hug Lalli, but did look at him as if wondering if Lalli would try. Lalli just put his hand on Onni's shoulder and spoke one word to him. _"Kiitos."_  
  
_"Ei haitaa."_ There was a real sincerity in Onni's slight smile. He mirrored Lalli's movement, placing his hand on the shoulder opposite. _"Nähdään. Nuku hyvin."_ When Onni walked away, Lalli watched him go. Emil had to nudge Lalli's shoulder lightly to get his attention back to the crowd moving on. Siv felt a little uncomfortable witnessing the two cousins parting, feeling very sure despite the language barrier that this had been a personal moment. She did know enough now to realise Lalli was thanking Onni. Trying to appropriately thank someone for this kind of rescue effort must surely have been very difficult.  
  
"I didn't realise you and Onni had become friends." Siv took advantage of the walk home to start a conversation with Emil. The response he'd given to the question about his face had reminded her that she, too, had no idea where to begin here. This side topic might be as good a start as any.  
  
"I guess that's what happens if you walk all the way back from Moscow with someone? Honestly, it feels really weird to leave him now, we were sort of separated during quarantine but he was still in the next building, and before that we weren't out of each other's sight for more than- what's wrong?"  
  
Siv was staring at Emil open-mouthed. When she spoke, it was in a croak. _"Moscow?"_  
  
"It's a big city in Ru-"  
  
"I know what it is! Emil, what were you _thinking_?" Siv was raising her voice slightly, causing their whole party to stare. Vasiliy took a step away from her, looking spooked.  
  
"Emotional Swedish arguments can wait until we are off the street." Jaana's tone was curt, but with a slight ring of amusement. "Not just because we might get caught. I want to be sitting down for this story." Now that they were nearly at their house with the way ahead of them clear, she seemed to be in more or less a good mood. Lalli was watching Siv and Emil's conversation with interest, but no sign of recognition. Siv wasn't sure if this was a total lack of understanding or just his apparently standard blankness.  
  
"Does he" - Siv caught herself mid-sentence and shifted direction, realising she was being rude - "Lalli, do you speak any Swedish yet?" Siv didn't think it was hugely unlikely that Lalli had kept learning a little, as he'd been doing the last time she'd met him.  
  
"I think he's forgotten everything he learned two years ago." Emil replied for him, turning to Lalli and asking him something in Finnish, getting only a head-shake and _en_ in response. "Yep, he didn't understand a word. I don't think he wants to learn it, to be honest." Siv was slightly miffed on Emil's behalf, but then, the two did seem able to communicate perfectly well now. She had the feeling that she'd be annoyed if someone she was seeing had seemingly no desire to talk with her family members, but it wasn't as if she visited often, so it made sense that Lalli saw no point making the effort. Siv was about to start commenting on the progress Emil had made, but they finally reached the door of the house. Once inside, Emil was greeted by shouts of joy from Miri and Sini.  
  
Siv was taking off her coat and shoes alongside Vasiliy as Emil's sat down in the kitchen and began to try answering the barrage of questions from his housemates. Vasiliy's boots were unusual, quite tall and made of thick felt. He was peering through to the warm kitchen, putting his gun down next to where Lalli had put his own when he'd entered. Siv realised she hadn't introduced herself. She extended a hand, saying her name and pointing to herself with her free hand. "Siv."  
  
"Vasiliy." His voice had an intonation to it that sounded very exotic, and he shook her hand with stiff politeness.  
  
"Neither you nor me understand a word of the questioning that's going on in there." She smiled as she made her comment, trying to project some friendliness. He just tilted his head in confusion, the shifting of the earflaps on his hat making his expression turn out slightly comical. When he took the hat off and put it with the rest of his outdoor layers, Siv saw his hair was barely long enough to sit around his ears and just a shade blonder than Emil's. Siv put her shoes away and gestured that he should follow her into the kitchen. There were not nearly enough chairs to seat eight people in here, but Vasiliy leaned against the wall, looking unbothered by the crowding. Jaana was also leaning, against the edge of the sink, appraising the room. "Siv, I don't know what language to start the questions in."  
  
"I thought the idea was to avoid endless questions before we've gotten to rest." Emil spoke from where he was parked on one of the mis-matching chairs. "Uhh, that one." He was gesturing at one of several jars of tea Miri was holding up to choose from. Miri showed the inside of the jars to Vasiliy as well, whose face brightened up at the sight.  
  
"I'll take that as a yes as well". Miri gave Vasiliy a thumbs up and got to work. Lalli was sitting next to Emil, again looking even more lost than he usually did at the switch back into Swedish.  
  
"Honestly, we can't stick around for that many questions. We're _really_ tired." Emil hadn't even bothered to take his coat off properly, only unbuttoning it despite the warmth of the stove.  
  
"I want to know what on earth you were doing in Moscow, if nothing else." Siv shuffled past Vasiliy and moved to lean near where Jaana was.  
  
Emil took a deep breath. "Well, the short version is, we were rescuing Lalli. He got stuck there."  
  
"Stuck?" Sini followed her interjection with a question to Lalli, who responded curtly, an elbow plopping down on the table and a grumpy cheek coming to rest on his palm.  
  
"He also thought this was going to involve less questions for now." Emil filled Siv in on what Lalli had said.  
  
"I suppose that is what I promised." Jaana was looking quizzically at Emil. "I am kind of wondering about your face too, though."  
  
"Oh, yeah. Troll. I think it's too healed to get stitches and it's going to be this bad forever." Emil looked upset about it. "I didn't actually see it until two weeks ago when we got into quarantine, there weren't any proper mirrors."  
  
"I mean, it could be worse. You haven't picked at it as much as you usually always pick at your face, it looks pretty clean." Siv supposed he'd been wearing gloves for almost the whole time he'd been out there.  
  
"I told you, I was _squeezing_ them, not _picking_ them, and I haven't had that in -ah, whatever. It's still pretty bad." Emil poked at the half-scarred line now, tracing it with his finger along the angle it made between his eyebrows and across his cheek. Lalli saw him do it and reached out, taking Emil's hand and placing it on the table before going back to spectating the conversation. Emil sighed.  
  
"Really, it could be much worse." Siv meant it. Whatever part of a troll caused a slice like that had been sharp enough not to catch much, and it had been enough of a glance to totally skip over going too near his eye. It was definitely going to be obvious forever, but she wouldn't have called it disfiguring. If he kept leaving it alone, it would likely fade and smooth out eventually into a fairly neat stripe.  
  
Emil sighed again, taking the tea Miri was finally handing out. "Yeah, I dunno. I don't know where to start with all this anyway. I wish I could go see Viivi and Janne right away, but it's so late they must be asleep." Siv did remember these names from Emil's letters, and had gathered the two children had become a big focus of his life. She had wondered many times what exactly would be going on with them, now that Emil was mysteriously gone with no publicly known return date.  
  
"I told Merja you were alive. Right after Sanna spoke to Onni. She did say she'd tell the kids you weren't dead." Jaana's words did seem to reassure Emil, who didn't seem fazed at all by the fact they were now discussing magic.  
  
"Thank you so much." Emil took a first tentative sip of his tea. "It's kind of funny, we got the message about that right before the Russians found us, we thought they were going to keep us quarantined for weeks and leave us waiting to travel till spring." The fact Emil had alluded to the mages' meeting already in his letter and now responded like this was something Siv didn't quite know how to take. She'd been wracking her brains since before Emil arrived back, trying to find a way to explain the fact people in Keuruu and the Russian wilderness were on the same page, and come up with nothing. It was a deeply perturbing piece of evidence.  
  
Emil addressed Siv next. "Um, I have a question of my own. Where have you been sleeping?"  
  
"In your room."  
  
"Oh. I guess we'll go stay in Lalli's room tonight, then?" He turned and questioned Lalli about it, who gave a fairly lengthy response, nodding. "Oh, he says the blankets should even be set up for the winter already, that works, I guess. He sleeps on the floor until about the end of December, and once it's cold enough to make him use the mattress it's _really_ cold in there, so I don't go over there often..."  
  
Laura spoke once Emil's attempt to explain Lalli's habits trailed off. "Are we just going to have Vasiliy sleeping in our kitchen?"  
  
Emil shrugged, then yawned in a way that was definitely affected. "I mean... are we okay to leave him with you? You speak more Russian than any of us, so... I think we should probably go sleep now, we're really tired." He looked at Vasiliy. "I think he'll be better off with you than us."  
  
Jaana raised her eyebrows. "Haven't you just had nearly two months running around with Lalli? We'd like to talk to you." Her words were, as ever, to the point. Siv had twigged to how keen Emil and Lalli were to go and "sleep", but wasn't about to say anything.  
  
_"Jaa-aa, mut Onni oli siellä koko vitun ajan."_ Siv didn't know why Emil thought it was more subtle to reply to Jaana in Finnish. The fact Lalli was able to twig to the topic and could visibly perk up at it made the intention, if anything, more obvious.  
  
"I think there's spare blankets." Siv changed the topic back to Vasiliy's sleeping arrangements, and Lalli's eyes narrowed in clear annoyance at the conversation returning to more Swedish.  
  
"Yes, there are." Miri shifted out of her chair and went upstairs to look for them. Lalli rolled his eyes and started tugging lightly on Emil's sleeve. Emil was looking between Lalli and the rest of the room, grinning sheepishly.  
  
"I think we're gonna go sleep now." He at least had the grace to blush a little as, when he stood up, Lalli grabbed the front of his jacket and started tugging him along. The tone of his voice was a little taken aback. _"Lalli!"_ Emil called back at Siv as he was led away. "Hey, um, let's talk more tomorrow, I promise I'll tell you everything-" He stopped talking as he stood in the entrance area and had his boots wordlessly handed to him by Lalli, who pulled on his own outside clothes and picked up his gun before leading Emil out the door. It slammed behind them, leaving Vasiliy scrambling for his coat and shoes as he frantically put his tea down and tried to follow them.  
  
Jaana called out to Vasiliy, first his name then a string of words that sounded only vaguely connected. Vasiliy stopped, looking back at her, one boot half on. Jaana looked at the ceiling as if straining her memory, then just pointed at the chair Emil had freed up, making insistent noises. Vasiliy was looking between the door and Jaana, then clearly made a decision, coming to sit down and taking his tea again. He looked extremely nervous to be left among total strangers, but when Jaana took out pen and paper and wrote something down for him, he relaxed a little.  
  
"I'm going to try this instead of talking. Really, I have no idea how to pronounce any of it." Jaana waited for him to write something back, then cringed. "Oh, the book did say the cursive would be hard. I can't read this at all." She did manage to get this across with a lot of tapping of her own writing, and Vasiliy tried again, printing the strange alphabet much more clearly. The exchange of words took long enough that Jaana had the time to explain what she was receiving and attempting each time, aided heavily by the index in the back of her lone book.  
  
_I do not speak Russian well. I am finding a person. That person speaks Russian well._  
  
_I don't understand, do you mean that you know who they are already?_  
  
_A Dane. In two days, a Dane comes._  
  
_What is a Dane?_  
  
_Denmark person. Denmark is a different country. Here is Finland. Denmark is west._  
  
_I didn't know there was more further west._  
  
_There is. Do you understand? The Dane is coming._  
  
_Yes. The one who speaks Russian well. Thank you._  
  
These eight sentences took over an hour, the nature of the book Jaana was using making it hard to quickly look up many of the words she needed. Vasiliy professing not to know about more westerly nations took her quite a while to translate. "I'm sure this grammar is wrong" was a phrase she uttered many times as she tried to express that he would be able to communicate properly soon. With the last message, though, she was sure she'd gotten it across. Luckily, not much communication was required when they rolled out the pile of spare blankets and moved the table aside so there was room for him to sleep.  
  
Siv finally took a moment to contemplate Vasiliy as everyone headed upstairs for the night. He seemed comfortable enough by the stove in their kitchen, fetching his coat for extra padding on the floor. He was clearly no older than Emil, and very lost. Siv had no idea what had compelled him to follow three strangers home, and guessed he had no way to predict how momentous his arrival was going to be. In two days' time, they'd be finding out exactly what kind of place he'd come from, and trying to explain the variation and breadth of the world he'd wandered into. It was slightly scary, realising that the world he was from might be just as large as the one known to her. The Known World was certainly about to expand, but nobody knew by how much. That was a topic for the morning, though. Now, they had just one young man in their kitchen, looking very woozy. Siv watched Vasiliy's face as she dimmed the lamp, waiting for his nod before turning it off and heading upstairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation notes:
> 
> Jaana: (at Lalli's travel sickness) Oh no.
> 
> _
> 
> Onni: Where are we going?  
> Jaana: Wait a moment. Home. 
> 
> -
> 
> Lalli: Thank you.  
> Onni: It was no problem. See you later. Sleep well.
> 
> \- 
> 
> Lalli: No, I don't.
> 
> _
> 
> Emil: Yes, but Onni was there the whole fucking time...


	36. Chapter 36

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like it's pretty obvious before it happens that this chapter is going to be 90% shagging, but you know, fair warning. Made today a double update so if you don't like that, you still have your content in the chapter before.

"You know, you didn't have to be _quite_ so obvious." Emil was stumbling behind, pulled along by Lalli's hand in his.  
  
"I thought you said you wanted to go somewhere we could be alone as soon as we got back to Keuruu." Lalli was very sure he remembered Emil saying that, multiple times.  
  
In quarantine, they'd still had no privacy, at least one of the other people in their immunes bunk always seeming to hang around. The few times they'd had nobody watching them, they'd taken the chance to be affectionate, but it was always knowing they wouldn't get more than a couple of minutes before someone came by. Lalli was really quite good at repressing his want for things if need be, but the last two weeks had been the crest of a very long-building frustration. He'd tried to be patient with the unintelligible conversation stretching out, but Emil's ability to talk on and on would have kept them there all night if Lalli hadn't intervened.  
  
"I didn't expect my aunt to be there!"  
  
Lalli stopped, Emil colliding a little with him as he was dragged forward. "Do you want to go back and talk to her more?" This was indeed surprising information, so maybe it did make sense for the plan to change.  
  
Emil squeezed Lalli's hand, grinning and kissing him on the cheek, then moved past and took his own turn to start dragging the other forward. "Oh, absolutely not." It was a good thing it had gotten so late already. Anybody looking at them would have thought they were acting strangely, but nobody was around to do so. By the time they were near Lalli's room, they were almost jogging, pulling each other forwards in turn. There would be so much to do tomorrow, but it couldn't happen before then, so the time was their own.  
  
Lalli shut the door of his room behind them then immediately pushed Emil up against it. He placed a hand on his chest, telling him to stay there, proceeding to calmly locate and light the lamp. Emil watched him, eyes revealing themselves to be very wide once the lamp's glow grew and Lalli approached again. Practical matters dealt with, Lalli pinned Emil by his shoulders and finally, finally kissed him the way he'd wanted to for weeks. He'd been imagining the reaction to this for almost as long, and there it was, Emil immediately shuddering and relaxing into it with a breathy moan that met all Lalli's hopes.  
  
They should get their boots off, at least, before they tried anything, and ideally get to the bed, and get into it. Emil's arms were wrapped around him and he didn't want to leave them. Their bodies were pressed together again, finally without any pretense at decency. Both sets of hands were freezing, but it was warm under their shirts, and the feeling of hands warming up on his back was so good. When Emil kissed his neck and left behind light patches of spit, the cold found them and they tingled. Emil's thigh was sliding between his legs, and he was so hard against it, he couldn't bring himself to pull away.  
  
Emil's knees were buckling. They did that when Lalli bit his earlobes, or dug thumbnails into his hipbones, like he was doing now. The two of them needed to move, so they stumbled back into the room. Lalli ended up pushed against the little counter opposite his bed, Emil heavy on him as he leaned into the desperate, tongue-heavy kissing. He managed to wriggle backwards enough to rest his weight back and wrap his legs around Emil's body. Two months of no relief had made Lalli so in need of this that feeling another hard cock pressing against his was nearly torturous. They still needed to somehow disentangle enough to get into bed.  
  
Emil was kissing his neck again, sliding a hand up his shirt, then down his shirt, into the waistband of his trousers. Lalli pulled Emil closer into him as he felt the hand on his cock. By now, anything like relief bordered on an ache, and Lalli couldn't help the soft keening that escaped him. It had barely been a few minutes of this, but it had been two months of deprivation, and he was more ready than he could describe for whatever was coming. Emil seemed extremely ready, too, grinding into him with total abandon.  
  
" _Please_ let me suck you off." Emil's voice was ragged in his ear, and his grip was so firm, and he was so sincere when he begged to taste it. Lalli just grabbed the top of Emil's hair and scrambled to get his feet down firmly enough to support his weight, trying to wedge himself back and failing to get very far. Emil's knees thudded slightly as they hit the floor with no time for grace or caution, and the way he parted Lalli's thighs was totally single-minded. When he fished Lalli's cock out of his trousers and ran his tongue up it from base to tip, Lalli's toes curled in his boots and his free hand gripped the counter hard enough to hurt his fingertips.  
  
When Emil’s hot, hungry mouth found the tip and began to work alongside his hands, Lalli knew this was not going to take long. Emil's hand found Lalli's and guided it, pressing down, indicating how hard Lalli could go. Lalli had forgotten how much Emil moaned when you gripped his hair, and took full advantage. Once, Emil had asked him to just watch what happened when he did this, kneeling naked in front of him and insisting he'd see it really was good to make him gag a little. Lalli remembered how he'd seen Emil's cock react once the jabbing at his throat had made his eyes water, desperately hard and oozing with precum. Knowing Emil felt that way about what was happening was even better than the mouth on his cock. Crushing Emil's head down, hearing him choke and holding it there made the fingers on Lalli's hips grip tighter. The gasps for air when Emil got to pull back, and his whimpers of joy while he immediately came back for more, were probably the best noises Lalli had ever heard.  
  
Lalli felt his foot slip on the floor. He was sliding down, unable to concentrate on things like staying upright any more, his weight uncertain on the one free hand still gripping the countertop. Emil's fingers dug into his hips, steadying him, and his lips were so slick and hot, the pressure so welcome. It felt like it had been so long since this had happened, but Emil hadn't forgotten at all what he liked. Lalli's fingers tightened in Emil's hair and his lips parted in a long, shuddering gasp, Emil taking the signal to go even harder in the few seconds before Lalli came. It was over so soon. Emil swallowed it down so readily. Lalli felt outside of his own body for a moment, floating on the aftermath of his orgasm as Emil pulled himself to his feet, looking at him with undisguised, wide-pupiled lust.  
  
It was still cold in here. The last few minutes hadn't left much room to notice that, but it was. The tension in Lalli's legs and arms relaxed and he slumped back against the cupboard, finally noticing the cramps of holding this position revealing themselves. He gripped the front of Emil's coat, suddenly wishing much more that they were lying down together. Emil was still stood between his legs and leaning over him, lips parted slightly and breathing heavy. He knew better than to put his hands all over Lalli right now, but he very clearly wanted to.  
  
"Give me a moment." Emil didn't need to be told, but maybe he needed reassuring that his turn was coming. He was steaming with arousal, the space around him glowing with heat. That warmth would be very welcome. "Let's actually get into bed." Emil nodded mutely and bit his lip when Lalli undid his coat for him before pushing him off. Lalli shed his outer clothes and burrowed into the pile of blankets that usually just about managed to keep his own warmth in. When Emil had finally managed to do the same, Lalli pulled him under too. Emil shivered at their bodies being pressed together again. It occured to Lalli that now he had dealt with his most immediate urges, he could do this the way he usually liked to.  
  
He slipped a hand into Emil's pants, just to feel, making him gasp. Just as Lalli expected, his underwear was soaked in a little circle where the tip of his cock met cloth. Going down just now had left Emil as oozing hard as it always did. Lalli removed his hand and pulled Emil underneath him, pretending to ignore the way he whined at the backtracking. It had been so long since he'd gotten to hear Emil moan, and he was going to enjoy as much of it as possible before he let it end. Emil couldn't resist trying to grab his own cock when Lalli went back to working on his neck and ears, clearly gasping for touch, but Lalli laced his fingers into those on the hand that moved and gently pinned it back by Emil's head. The sound of him when he was desperate was worth savouring.  
  
Emil was wrapping his legs around one of Lalli's thighs and grinding. Lalli let him for a moment, then when he heard his breathing become more ragged, grabbed his hips to stop him. Emil made a noise at being denied that was almost a sob, then keened at the feeling of Lalli's thumbs digging into his hipbones. Lalli's hands going up his shirt, then slowly working that shirt upwards, made him start begging. The noises he produced at Lalli slowly easing his trousers down, but not his underwear, were somewhere between Lalli's name and wordless moaning. Lalli paused before starting to lick his nipples and fondle his cock through his last layer of clothes, feeling like having the time to draw this out was a gift that should be taken.  
  
"You're _so_ mean." That was the first coherent sentence Emil had produced in a while, still breathy and halting. Lalli responded by biting him hard and enjoying the way he desperately thrust up, whining at the way Lalli avoided letting him grind. It was impossible to get at enough of him, when they truly couldn't remove that many of their clothes. Lalli's teeth found earlobes and nipples, dug into what little of Emil's shoulder they could access, and his tongue followed to wake up the sensitive marks they left. He finally eased off Emil's underwear, gripped his cock, and started to pump up and down. Emil stopped breathing for a few seconds, then moaned and melted around Lalli's tongue in his mouth. His blissful noises found a patchy rhythm as he relaxed into finally feeling Lalli's hand, then very quickly turned into half-breathing again as two months of deprivation caught up on him. Emil arched up as he came, cum dripping through Lalli's fingers onto his bare stomach.  
  
Lalli noticed he was half hard again, but decided to ignore it. Emil was extremely done, lying back on Lalli's pillow, staring up at him with out-of-focus eyes and a slightly dazed grin. He blinked and winced for a second. "I, um. My balls hurt now." This didn't seem to bother him, because he moved straight to sighing and wrapping his arms around Lalli. "So good. Mmm." Lalli had to pull away from his attempts to nuzzle his hair and kiss him, looking for something to clean up with. Luckily, he found it quickly and dealt with the problem soon enough. He slid back into bed next to Emil, who draped himself around him and sighed happily, getting right back to the task of burying his face in Lalli's neck.  
  
Lalli had asked once if the amount of cuddling and soppy mumbling Emil always came out with after sex was what he was meant to be doing too. Emil had flushed at the question, going very quiet, then asked if it was a problem. It hadn't been. Lalli just didn't naturally act that way, but Emil's urge to pet his hair and murmur about what a nice time he'd had definitely wasn't bad. Usually, it was just reassuring noise to feed the post-sex glow, not actually as important as the way he was being held, and half the time it wasn't even in Finnish anyway. Lalli's heart did twist a little this time, though, when Emil whispered "I'm so glad you're alive."  
  
"I wouldn't be without you." Lalli had thought about this fact many times during the journey back, but now, finally in safety, it was overwhelming.  
  
"Mmm, I guess." Emil sounded sleepy.  
  
The softness of Emil's hair against Lalli's cheek and the lightness of his pulse ticking made his fragile mortality so visceral. The fact they'd really both survived felt utterly miraculous. "You came to get me even though you could have died."  
  
"Course I did." The response was the only one he could really have expected, and that was miraculous too.  
  
Emil's eyes were fluttering shut. Lalli managed to lean far enough to put out the lamp without leaving bed. With company, this bed was actually warm enough to fall asleep quickly, and Lalli did.


	37. Chapter 37

Emil woke up with some of Lalli's hair in his mouth. He'd fallen asleep spooning him last night, pressing as close as he could, keeping out both the cold and any sneaking feelings he had that the moment would have to end. Neither of them had moved much in the night, so Emil's arm was totally dead. He wiggled his fingers, trying to wake it up without also waking Lalli, wincing at the pins and needles that started prickling away at him. Lalli did end up waking at the feeling of Emil's arm shifting, looking back over his shoulder and blinking blearily. "Mm?"  
  
"My arm went dead." Lalli lifted up a little to let him extract it, then snuggled back down against the pillow and closed his eyes again with a light huff. It was still pretty early, and when Jaana had explained the plan of going to see Virpi once they'd had a night free, she hadn't actually said when in the morning. Emil wasn't actually entirely sure what day of the week it was, and what everyone would need to do. Presumably this was important enough that the schedule could be bent, whatever it was.  
  
Lalli was already asleep again. Emil was starting to become aware of the cold now he'd shifted the blankets around. As he prodded the last of the tingling out of his arm, Emil noticed that the water canister in the room was totally frozen, and they probably had no food in here either. Emil, Onni and Vasiliy had eaten yesterday evening, but the last time Lalli had eaten was worryingly uncertain, given how the boat ride had been. Emil knew full well that Lalli was likely to totally forget about this if enough was happening around him, so it had probably been a while.  
  
He sat up a bit, trying not to disturb the blankets over Lalli too much. Lalli woke up a little and rolled over, burying his face into the warmth of Emil's side. Emil's hands felt cold once they'd left the cocoon, but he had to pause before searching for his gloves. Lalli's softly resting face, half-buried against him and embracing the obliviousness of sleeping in safety, was something it was still surreal to be seeing again. Lalli's eyes - the big, expressive, almond-shaped ones he could now admit he'd fallen in love with long before he came to Finland - were closed so peacefully. Emil wanted to preserve that peace forever, but soon it would be gone again.  
  
He sighed, sitting up further and stroking Lalli's hair. "Morning."  
  
Lalli grumbled.  
  
"Lalli, I think I just remembered you haven't eaten in a while. You should have some breakfast."  
  
"No food here. Didn't leave any when I went away."  
  
"We're going to have to go back to mine then, I guess."  
  
Lalli smushed his face harder against Emil's waist. "They're going to ask us to tell them everything that happened. There's so much."  
  
Emil couldn't honestly try to reassure him otherwise. "We'll get through it. We have to eventually." He remembered that there was another task he needed to do urgently. "I kind of want to go to Merja's on the way there, too." Lalli grumbled at that as well. "You don't have to do anything with the kids. I just really want to let them know I'm back."  
  
Lalli pulled Emil back down, smushing his face onto the pillow. "I think you want to sleep more." Just getting back into bed was truly tempting, but now that Emil had remembered his intense worry about Viivi and Janne, he couldn't find himself willing to follow the direction Lalli was going with the half-groping cuddling he was starting.  
  
"I'm sorry." Emil tried to show he meant it with the tenderness of the kiss he gave before finally rolling out of bed. "Hey, you know, they can't put you back on a shift schedule for a couple of days yet, I bet. Maybe for the next few nights we'll both be free. More likely if we start stuff early today." Lalli seemed a little mollified by this idea, and started looking for his outdoor clothes at the same time Emil did. Their boots and coats were all over the floor, evidence of how frenzied they'd been the night before. Emil could feel slight bruises on his knees when he knelt to put on his boots, and despite his general worry, smiled a little to himself at the memory of getting them.  
  
The street outside had slightly too many people for comfort. None of them were people Emil was close to, but a few did double takes as he and Lalli walked by. They really wouldn't be able to hide their return for long. It had been so long, or felt like it had been so long, since Emil visited Merja that he almost forgot the doorbell's clapper had long come off. He hammered on the door, calling out to her, and her face when she opened the door had an expression Emil couldn't categorise.  
  
"You took your time. What on earth happened to your face?" She didn't seem to know whether to be angry or relieved, and didn't wait for an answer to her question. "You would not believe the time I've had with Viivi while she dealt with this." Whatever Merja's intention with that phrasing was, she couldn't have picked one that made Emil feel worse. He had really hoped that somehow, those two would be coping with the disruption of someone who came over so often just disappearing on them, but it had never been a realistic hope. His heart hammered as Merja called behind her to Viivi and Janne, wondering what the reception would be. Lalli shrank back a little as the two appeared and proceeded to react, both doing so very differently.  
  
Viivi just screamed, the noise so shrill Lalli covered his ears. _"Emil!"_ She ran up to him, arms raised in a signal to pick her up, which Emil did. Once he had, she started crying, loudly and in a way that seemed quite purely overwhelmed. Janne just stared, and Emil had never felt so justly judged and accused in his life.  
  
"I thought you died." It was hard to understand what Janne said clearly through Viivi's screaming in his ear, but Emil did hear him. Janne was too young to be calculating any impact when he said that, his voice horribly level, and that fact broke Emil's heart. Whatever progress the two of them had made so far was going to have to be retrod, at the very least. Feeling shaky in the idea of them getting back to whatever normality they'd had was a freshly awful feeling for Emil.  
  
Viivi's crying was becoming a quieter sort as Emil continued to hold her. Emil squat down in front of Janne, re-adjusting Viivi against his hip and hoping honesty would be worth something. He'd thought about how to phrase this many times on the walk back, and still hadn't come up with anything particularly good. "Janne, I'm sorry. I had to go on a mission, and it was a surprise to me too. There wasn't any way to let _anybody_ besides my housemates know, you weren't the only one I didn't tell. And Lalli would have died if I hadn't gone." It was impossible to tell if it had helped.  
  
Merja was watching the interaction wearily. She certainly looked older than she had before Emil had left, despite the objectively short time he'd been gone. "Are you here today, then?"  
  
Emil shook his head. "I think we're going to have to answer a lot of questions. We, um, we made contact with another nation. It's a long story."  
  
"Another nation?"  
  
"We went to Russia." Emil wondered how many times he'd be repeating the details of this story. It already felt like a lot. Viivi had calmed a little and was tugging at Emil's jacket for attention. "Emil, you should stay here. We didn't finish the book yet."  
  
"I have to go talk to people about the Russia thing. I can't hang around all day." Viivi reacted terribly to this, starting to cry again.  
  
_"Stay!"_ Viivi's vocalising was half word, half scream of despair.   
  
Merja sighed. "I wouldn't trust you to come back again if I were her, either."  
  
Emil hated how much he saw her point. "I mean, I really have to go talk to my aunt - I could take them with me?" It wouldn't be the first time the two had visited Emil at home, and it would be nice for Siv to meet them. Merja agreed this sounded best for now, shaking her head in despair at Emil as she helped him get the two children into their outdoor clothes. Emil was still feeling the heat of guilt grow, realising what a state he'd left behind him here. He'd been honest with Janne. There had genuinely been no other option, and of course he couldn't actually regret saving Lalli from a horrible death. Whether that actually meant anything to these two in the long run, though, would be something he would have to wait to find out.  
  
Janne followed in total silence. Viivi was still refusing to be put down. Lalli didn't look best pleased with these two having joined them, but he couldn't deny the situation. More people stared as they crossed town to find the house where Emil lived, although luckily nobody actually stopped them.  
  
It was still quite early morning when Lalli, Emil and the two children arrived. They found the kitchen full again. On a normal day, everyone would have gone to work by now or there would be at least a few people away doing something else. Clearly, everyone was waiting for them. Miri greeted the two children with familiarity. "Viivi! Janne! You decided to visit!"  
  
Janne was still emoting very sparingly, and sat in the corner. Viivi kept clinging to Emil as everyone cleared chair space for he and Lalli to sit down. Emil mentioned that Lalli really needed to eat something, and breakfast was handed out to them both. Lalli finished his first portion so fast Miri handed him another, which he consumed much more slowly, but did manage to eat all of. Viivi insisted on getting some of Emil's breakfast, despite definitely having been fed already this morning.  
  
"Are these the two you've been writing to me about, Emil?" Siv asked.  
  
"They are."  
  
Viivi grumped at Emil speaking Swedish. "Emil, speak Finnish."  
  
"I need to speak to my aunt. She can't speak Finnish."  
  
"Well, teach her." All the Finnish-speakers in the room snorted at Viivi's attitude, leaving Siv raising her eyebrows and looking around to try to find the joke.  
  
Emil explained to Siv. "She says you need to learn to speak Finnish, right now." Siv laughed at that, then looked at Jaana and spoke.  
  
"You know, these two are reminding me, I don't think anyone's said..."  
  
Jaana hummed. "I was going to wait to hear all their news first, then start sharing all of our news." Emil agreed that sounded like a good exchange. Getting to hear whatever news there was since he'd left would be nice, after the horribly long rehashing he was going to have to do.  
  
Emil turned to Lalli. "I think I should explain everything in Swedish, so Siv understands. Can I ask you if I need details?"  
  
Lalli just put his arms on the table and rested his head on them. "Yeah."  
  
Finally, the explanation began. Viivi kept sitting in Emil's lap, kicking her feet and intermittently requesting they speak Finnish, making Emil recap the last few sentences he'd come out with so she felt like she was getting some information. Sini started to play noughts-and-crosses with Janne, mind still mostly on the conversation but occupying him sufficiently. Vasiliy was in much the same state as Lalli, staring into space and fiddling as everyone else's attention was pulled into the story.  
  
They were all trying not to interrupt, but there were just so many things that might inspire comment. A "Nice!" from Laura at the story of resurrecting the car, gasps from all at the description of the first giant, horror as they learned where Onni and Emil had ended up having to drive to. Jaana remembered Emil had brought her map, then rolled her eyes when she learned Emil had left it in a car near Moscow. Emil didn't know how to properly describe what had actually happened in Moscow, but the brief details he gave of descending into that pit and finding Lalli in such a state left everyone in a stunned hush. "Oh, and that's when the thing on my face happened." The only surprise people expressed was that he hadn't come out with worse.  
  
It was hard to put words to the journey back. "We were really relieved when we worked out Onni wasn't infected" seemed utterly inadequate. The days upon days of walking, the endless cold, the mundane setbacks of filth and tiredness and food poisoning, all stretched into an eternity in his memory. Emil wanted to describe the way such interdependence and drudgery had begun to knit he, Lalli and Onni together, turning them into a unit. He wasn't sure if the word he wanted for the bond they'd grown might be "familial", "comradely", or something else entirely. In the end, he settled for sticking to the literal detail. The description of the first meeting with Vasiliy made everyone turn their heads towards the man in question.  
  
"He was pointing a gun at you?" Sini was looking at Vasiliy with a new wariness.  
  
"Well, Lalli pointed a gun at him first. We were all very surprised."  
  
"Oh. I guess I can see how that would have happened."  
  
Emil managed to describe the last few days of their journey in a bit more detail. He lingered on the village, and the way they'd had to fight even at the last turn. Siv was clearly bothered by his matter-of-fact description of Onni's magic shredding the Rash-afflicted wolves, but didn't comment. Finally, he got to the last few things, running scared from the woods' danger and marching through the night to wake some farmer before the dawn. When he got to the part where they made it into quarantine, he stopped. That was, he supposed, the end of the story.  
  
When Emil finished, everyone was quiet for a moment, before Jaana finally raised a question. "So, did you ever find out what the signal was that Lalli was sent to track?"  
  
Emil nudged Lalli, who had started dozing on the table. "Hey, Lalli. Jaana wants to know if you ever found the source of the signal." Lalli raised his head and blinked, thinking about his answer.  
  
"The source, yes, I have been very near to where it comes from. But there are no people who might be making the signal."  
  
Jaana was confused, answering Lalli directly in Finnish. "Surely there's nothing that could still be running after all this time. Someone must have been there, some time after the city was abandoned."  
  
Lalli shrugged. "There's some power there. It's weird." He seemed satisfied with his own answer.  
  
"But what could power a radio for 90 years after everyone was dead? There's no fuel that does that." In contrast to Lalli, Jaana would probably be bothered by this question forever.  
  
Siv interjected. "Anything interesting?"  
  
"Lalli found the place it was coming from, but nobody was living there and we don't know how it was still being powered." Jaana replied to Siv in Swedish, then switched back to Finnish to keep including Lalli. "So, anyway, the news I had." She paused, waiting for Emil or Lalli to respond.  
  
"Yeah?" Emil was really wondering by now what could have changed around here in a couple of months.  
  
"I'm having a baby."  
  
That had not been the news Emil expected. "Since when?"  
  
"Since before you left, actually. Remember the note I left, the one you wrote about being 'back next week' on?"  
  
Emil did remember. " _Oh_. Oh, wow, I'm... sorry, I should have... so you...  what's going to happen? I just, I had no idea."  
  
"Didn't you? It happened before I left." Lalli informed Emil of this as though genuinely surprised, then looked to Jaana. "It is still the one that started in September, right?"  
  
"Why are mages like that?" Jaana asked Emil this in a despairing tone, but changed tack when Lalli started explaining that he had really thought they'd all known and just weren't talking about it. "No, Lalli, don't worry, I didn't mean I was upset. It's just a bit funny to hear. Anyway, we decided we wanted to all raise it together. Hence wanting to get everyone in on the discussion, you know. We guessed you wouldn't really disagree, though. I've been more or less assuming you were going to be around here and help with it, if I'm honest." At the last sentence, she finally faltered a little in her matter-of-fact tone, meeting Emil's eyes with real seriousness.  
  
"Well, yeah." Emil was still processing what exactly this would mean for the household he'd joined, but his response was very sure and immediate. Obviously, he was going to help out with whatever plans Jaana had. He felt on some level like he owed her something for having helped him so much at a strange stage in his own life. Even more than that, Jaana herself and her friendship meant a huge amount to him. She and the rest of this group of people had taken him in, and now they were close enough to find it natural to ask him to support them with something really important. It was weird and nice. He hoped he'd be okay at it.  
  
He should probably say something else, but working out how to express the affection he was feeling was a bit much right now. "Um, do you want a hug?"  
  
"I mean, I feel fine. But yes, it would be nice." Emil had to finally put Viivi down, thankfully not getting any more crying. Siv was watching Viivi, and Emil wondered if she was judging him somehow. He really wasn't sure how normal it was for a four-year-old to be as clingy as Viivi was with him. While she was usually less intense than this, and the reluctance to let Emil out of her sight made total sense right now, her behaviour was always quite different to the way his cousins were. It still seemed much better than Janne's issues connecting with people.  
  
This kitchen was really not meant to fit ten people, and getting around the table was an endeavour. Thinking about the crowd reminded Emil that this change in circumstances would have to merit a change in house eventually, but that was very much not a thought to pursue now. When he hugged Jaana, squeezing her lightly and inhaling the nice smell of her soap, he finally noticed that being pregnant had affected her.  
  
"Oh! I can feel it. You're uh, rounder. A bit." He had started speaking Swedish again, feeling odd about not including Siv.  
  
"Mm. Guess it's gonna get more obvious fairly soon."  
  
Siv chipped in. "It would probably be obvious already, if it wasn't your first one." She'd probably seen the way Emil's face changed at Jaana's news and had opted not to interrupt again till now.  
  
"So I hear." Jaana was looking at the clock. "I think we might have to get to the more unpleasant part of the day, now."  
  
Emil followed her gaze. It was nearly eleven in the morning, getting well past the time when any of them could be said to have acted promptly getting the new arrival to Virpi's office. Jaana repeated her observation to Lalli, who groaned and put his head back into his arms for a moment, then sat up and settled into the look of resignation he always adopted when unpleasant duty called. "Okay. I'm ready to do it."  
  
Vasiliy had gone into a trance of boredom, squatting down against the wall throughout this whole unintelligible conversation and occasionally staring at Janne and Sini's game. He heard Jaana call his name and stood up, watching her as she continued speaking in Finnish.  
  
"So, I think just one of us coming with you all makes sense, I've been running some stuff to do with this so I guess that's me. We need to fetch Onni too. Emil, you're gonna have to put these kids back. And once we're done with all that, I guess we hope Virpi doesn't get mad at us for having the new Russian ambassador sleep on our kitchen floor."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And with this chapter, the Kasvatus series goes over 100,000 words... thanks for sticking with me thus far, I really do appreciate it.


	38. Chapter 38

Onni stood outside Virpi's office, listening to the grilling Lalli was getting through the door. Emil, Jaana and Vasiliy were there with him, the first two also listening in while the third went back to leaning on the wall and staring into space. When they'd all first turned up, Virpi had immediately wanted to know why they didn't seem to be on schedule. Jaana's shrug and innocent-sounding guess that Posti were being their usual selves had been met with some narrowing of eyes, but Virpi had to admit it was totally plausible their letter had just taken a few more days than it should have.  
  
She intended on thoroughly questioning Emil and Onni eventually, but first she was getting the details of Lalli's initial journey. Jaana was not actually asked to hang around while all this happened, but hadn't been told to leave either. Onni somewhat appreciated her presence. He was not himself very good at deflecting criticism and people's changes in mood, so someone who was seemed like an asset right now.  
  
Lalli was explaining his experience tracking the signal, finding its source and trying to head under the ground to find its origin. Virpi was unfazed by how halting his description of losing himself in the tunnels was, asking him to recount everything around his fuzzy memories in as much detail as possible. Onni hadn't heard most of this himself. It clearly wasn't something Lalli was comfortable or certain talking about, and the sense in Virpi's voice that he needed to be justifying this loss of control seemed incredibly unfair. Now, she was making him go over exactly when he'd lost the signal for the third time, asking him to speak up so the recording she was making would be audible later on.  
  
Emil was equally aggrieved by the conversation he could hear, whispering to Onni. "I hate how she does this."  
  
Jaana whispered at Emil. "She doesn't usually press people this hard, you know. Even when I've disagreed with her, she's pretty fair and does try to see where I'm coming from."  
  
Emil gestured in the air to make up for the fact his voice couldn't have any volume. "Well, exactly! She isn't fair with _him_ , she treats Lalli like he doesn't have normal human feelings, just because he's, I don't know, she's one of the people who thinks he's difficult. I bet that's why she picked him in the first place. It's like, she knows he's good, but still doesn't actually give a shit about him." He scuffed his boot on the floor and took a deep breath in and out, his quiet hiss clearly holding back a lot of anger.  
  
Onni did think he knew what Emil meant, and was uncomfortably aware of the history of Virpi's attitude. She wasn't the first one to find Lalli difficult to deal with. When both of them had been younger, Onni had himself despaired at a few of the things Lalli did. He'd taken so long to grow out of biting people compared to other children, and had worried Onni sick with his refusal to eat more than a few specific foods for long stretches of time. The frustration on Onni's side had been horrible to feel, and presumably horrible to experience too. Onni really did feel like there weren't that many issues on Lalli's end now, but it was unfortunately the case that the remaining oddities in how he expressed himself led a lot of people to treat him with markedly less consideration than they would treat others.  
  
Emil was still looking at Onni. "You know what I mean, right? I'm not crazy for thinking Virpi treats him differently."  
  
Onni fixed his eyes awkwardly on the ceiling. "You're not wrong." He certainly had his own set of feelings about this, but didn't know what any of them could be doing about it right now. A post-mission debrief was a totally normal request, and handling it with sensitivity was not actually required by any protocol Onni knew of.  
  
"He's still skinnier than he was before he left. He had blood in his hair when it was happening, even in the dream world." Emil was whispering again, and Onni wasn't sure if the ranting was directed at him or at the universe in general. His arms were crossed very tightly and his jaw was tense as he glared at the wall opposite.  
  
"Getting angry at Virpi won't make Lalli feel any better." Jaana sounded both resigned at frustrated, at the situation and probably also slightly at Emil.  
  
Emil just took another very deep breath in and out, managing to do so in a way that projected absolutely seething anger. Onni hoped that, for Lalli's sake, he'd hold back on saying anything once it was time to question them all at once. He decided it was worth voicing the thought.  
  
"Emil, please let's just try to make this go quickly."  
  
Emil looked at Onni, then to the floor, sighing hard enough to move the hair that fell onto his face as he did so. "Yeah. It's for the best."  
  
Virpi was now questioning Lalli on whether he could remember the things he'd been hearing as he wandered the tunnels, and asking him to describe how he survived. Lalli was describing some kind of reinforced metal box that existed in every one of the underground stations he'd come across, then how he'd hidden inside them to catch tiny amounts of sleep. Onni didn't know why dragging up every horrible detail was necessary. It was very obvious by now that whatever he'd been searching for had no living human origin, and given they'd brought home someone as it was, Lalli had no reason to lie about having met anyone who might have helped him.  
  
Onni winced as Lalli's voice trailed off repeatedly when he tried to answer the question of how many days he'd been in there. Of course, he was holding back expressing it much more than Emil seemed capable of, but he did feel a real spark of anger at how information was being extracted from Lalli. It was obvious even from outside the room that he was having a terrible time. Onni didn't think he could have brought himself to sit across a desk from someone and repeat "speak up!" every time they went quieter, when the quietness had that feel to it. Lalli was explaining his experience in the tunnels very poorly, but it would be just as easy to assume a case of "can't" rather than "won't" and act accordingly.  
  
Finally, Virpi seemed more or less satisfied, and Onni heard the click of the recording device being turned off. "Alright, the rest of you can come in." Emil's eyes rolled up, and Onni saw his mouth moving in a way that looked very much like counting to himself before he squeezed his eyes shut for a second and put his hand on the doorknob. All three of them came in, only for Jaana to be dismissed by Virpi. "Oh, Jaana, I didn't expect you to still be here. Look, I want to know what happened to these three in their own words, no interruptions. I will talk to you later though, about some logistical things. Come back at 17." Jaana gave her an affirmative and left, looking back for a moment at Lalli's closed-off stance in his chair.  
  
Now Onni, Lalli, Emil and Vasiliy were sat in there, the chairs in the corners of Virpi's office all being dragged into the centre so she could look across her desk at them.  
  
"So." Virpi smiled. "We have a guest here." She extended a hand to Vasiliy. "Welcome to Finland, ah -"  
  
"His name's Vasiliy." Onni filled in as she trailed off.  
  
Vasiliy was shaking the offered hand, looking not very sure about what was going on.  
  
"Ah. He really does speak only Russian, then." Virpi paused, then went for the universal option of pointing at herself and saying her name. "Virpi." She then began again. "Welcome to Finland, Vasiliy."  
  
She got only a nod for a response, and looked at Onni. "I'm glad the translator is arriving tomorrow. This is quite difficult."  
  
Jaana had mentioned something on the way over about having communicated this fact to Vasiliy, too, and Onni thought this was worth mentioning. "Jaana said she learned enough Russian to tell him that help is on the way."  
  
"I did not know she had been in that archive. Well, it was clearly for the best, perhaps I did tell her she could do that and the chaos has made me forget." Virpi's usual results-oriented reasonableness, something Onni generally appreciated, felt a little jarring after the words he and Emil had exchanged just now.  
  
She placed her hands down on the desk. "Now, who is going to tell the story of how you made contact on the way back? I gather Vasiliy wasn't found on the way there, from Lalli's account of just you two coming to fetch him."  
  
"Indeed that's so. I can describe what happened." Onni could tell Emil was still quietly seething, and Lalli had certainly been made to talk enough. Virpi clicked the recording device on again, and signaled for him to begin.  
  
Onni glossed over the majority of his memories of the journey, the stages of relief as all of them recovered from entering that hellish city clearly of no interest to Virpi. He skipped ahead to reaching the shores of Lake Ladoga, describing how it seemed much like the rest of the near-empty countryside they'd crossed right up to their stay in the seemingly abandoned sauna. Virpi cringed at the description of their first meeting, and shot an irritated glance at Lalli when she heard Onni's description. "So you're telling me their very first impression of us was of Lalli yelling, in his socks and pointing a gun at one of them?"  
  
Lalli opened his mouth, but Onni held a hand up to him, feeling an edge of defensiveness creep into his voice as he replied. "Lalli had no way of knowing that Vasiliy wasn't a troll. As far as we all knew, there were no people in the area." The fact Lalli had been sleeping so incredibly lightly and warily, even in a solid building during such a cold part of the year, had likely been due in the first place to how vulnerable Onni was. It wouldn't be productive to get too loudly protective of Lalli, but it really did seem a stretch to assign blame to him for how things had gone.  
  
Virpi looked tense. "How was it resolved?"  
  
Onni described the way Emil had de-escalated the situation. At Virpi's praise for the effort, Emil just nodded curtly. "Mm. Thanks." Onni tried to clarify quickly that they had been treated well by the village, and with little suspicion beyond that which the need for quarantine merited. Virpi did agree that from his description, they didn't sound gravely offended by the way contact had been made, but she was still clearly bothered by the way this historic occurrence had played out. She listened during Onni's description of being quarantined, then reacted with a genuine enthusiasm when he described how they'd managed to communicate. "So I was right! There still are people speaking Finnish out there."  
  
"I wouldn't say it was Finnish." Onni's own home dialect being an eastern one had still left him very lost at half the things the man he'd met had said. It seemed at least as distinct as other close-but-separate languages Onni had heard of, perhaps more so based on the way he'd compared notes with Emil's understanding of Danish and Norwegian.  
  
"Well, close enough to understand." Virpi smiled at that. "Good to know. And then you were sent home, with this man in tow?"  
  
"More or less." Onni described being helped across the lake and given a guide. "We didn't actually expect him to follow us home."  
  
"Hmm." Virpi was appraising Vasiliy. "It is strange that they wouldn't send someone who could communicate, if this was intentional on the part of the whole village. I suspect we have a curious individual rather than a dedicated representative. He's certainly young."  
  
"I suspect you're right."  
  
Virpi was thinking. "I will have a map made that includes both eastern Finland and the area around Ladoga, and hopefully Vasiliy here will be able to help us by filling out the areas of settlement he knows of. It should all become much easier tomorrow to start finding things out about this new country." With that, she dismissed them. "Emil, have you been to see your normal workplaces yet?"  
  
"Not all of them. I should go tell Antti I'm alive, probably." Emil looked like he'd only just realised this.  
  
"Well, the work of everyone who went missing has been covered for now, so it can strictly speaking wait until tomorrow. You've come from a great journey of discovery, you know. Although if such a lack of notice happens again, I will have to consider barring you from being given any serious responsibilities." Her willingness to give a second chance in the light of their achievement was again a sign of reasonableness. Given all they'd left behind with no notice, it was from her perspective quite generous. Onni found himself resenting her amiable smile and friendly dismissal for the day.  
  
"I'll have a room allocated for Vasiliy. Jaana will get the details when I speak to her later, and I suppose is the most likely to be able to explain the arrangement to him, so keep him in familiar company for now and make sure he meets Jaana later. Can I ask where exactly he stayed last night?"  
  
"At my house." Emil answered carefully.  
  
"I trust he was given a bed."  
  
"You know, I didn't actually see where he slept, you'll have to ask Jaana." Emil stood up, placing his chair back in its usual place. "I think I am going to go quickly tell Antti I'm alive, bye, see you later."  
  
Once they were outside, Emil huffed again. "Oh, I'm so mad!"  
  
"Sorry." Lalli spoke very quietly, looking at the floor.  
  
"What? No!" Emil looked at Lalli in panic, his voice softening immediately. "Why would anyone be mad at you?"  
  
"Virpi thinks I did everything wrong." This level of defeat was beyond what was normal for Lalli. He'd clearly been put in a terrible place by the treatment of the last hour or so.  
  
Emil moved in front of Lalli, taking him very gently by the shoulders. "She was being really unfair to you." He chewed his lip a little. "She's always unfair to you." Lalli didn't seem very convinced, just staring at his shoes resentfully. Emil's shoulders drooped and his voice took on a sad, pleading tone. "I'm mad at _her,_ because she treats you like shit, and you don't deserve it."  
  
Lalli nodded. "Oh. Okay." The message clearly wasn't being received very well. Onni was about to comment that Lalli probably mostly needed some time to get over it, but Emil seemed to know anyway, reluctantly letting go and stepping back.  
  
"Are you actually going to go talk to Antti?" Onni asked.  
  
"Er, I might if we have time later. Right now, I think we should go home for a while." Emil was looking at Lalli with concern.  
  
"I'm going back to my room by myself." Lalli made the announcement and turned to go.  
  
"Oh, um, is it still okay if I sleep there tonight? It's just, my aunt has my room for now." Emil was calling after Lalli, which made him turn on his heel and face back.  
  
"Tonight is fine. Not this afternoon." He spun back around and headed off without another word. Emil watched him go, looking incredibly upset.  
  
Onni tried to mollify Emil. "If he's already picked out a time he wants to see you again, he must really want to do so."  
  
Emil stuck his hand under his hat, shuffling his fingers in his hair. "Oh, yeah, I know. Honestly, I'm mostly worried about how bad it must feel to survive a mission like that, then be treated like you still weren't doing well enough." He crossed his arms. "It's just, it isn't fair." At that, Onni turned to watch Lalli's retreat as well, catching a last glimpse of him as he turned the corner, shoulders hunched up and head down.  
  
"I do agree with you. He deserves better."  
  
"I wish I could just take him to the middle of the woods, you know? Just, let him fish and collect weird amounts of rabbit parts and sing to the lake gods or whatever they are, and tell him he's doing _great_ at it, every day, for the rest of his life." Immediately after this outburst, Emil looked very self-conscious and deflated, putting down the hands he'd been gesturing with and breathing out. "Sorry. Um. No offense intended with the still not knowing exactly what gods there are. Uh, you know, I guess if we did go see Antti, you could say hello as well. And Vasiliy could see, I dunno, a Finnish workshop. We might as well show him stuff, it must be getting boring not being able to talk to anyone."  
  
The idea Emil had come up with to distract from the revealing moment he'd had was a good one, and Onni agreed, now feeling quite self-conscious himself at having heard such an emotional rant. Containing the phrase "rabbit parts" probably disqualified this burst of romantic fervour from entering the poetry books, but Emil clearly meant it very sincerely. Even knowing what the two of them had done to save Lalli, it still came as a surprise.  
  
Antti did a double take as Emil and Onni arrived in his workshop, Vasiliy still in tow. Vasiliy did indeed seem interested in what was going on in here, hanging back from where people were at work but eyeing their activities very intensely.  
  
"You're both alive. I was starting to think I'd made a huge mistake in helping you leave." Antti's tone was measured, but Onni could feel that there was more than he let on behind that "starting to think".  
  
"Apologies for taking so long. We needed to make quite a long detour." Onni gripped the hand Antti extended, holding it for a moment. "It's good to be back."  
  
Antti nodded, meeting Onni's gaze and smiling, then was distracted by Vasiliy wandering deeper into the workshop. "Hey! Watch above your head."  
  
"He doesn't speak Finnish." Emil said, chasing after Vasiliy and tapping him on the shoulder before pointing out the things hanging from the ceiling.  
  
"Another Swede?" Antti followed up the question by asking Vasiliy, in Icelandic, if he spoke it.  
  
"So, there's an interesting story here." Onni wasn't sure how to begin sharing this news. "I think it might still be one Virpi doesn't want to spread far yet." Antti's face opened up with interest, waiting to see if Onni would continue. "Then again, we've not been told to keep any secret, and it's going to get out soon enough. We brought home a Russian."  
  
Antti was now very interested. "That is indeed quite a story. And he only speaks Russian?"  
  
"Indeed. Apparently there's a Dane who can help translate when they arrive tomorrow."  
  
"If there was a speaker of such a language in the Known World, I would have guessed it was a Dane." Antti seemed satisfied at the world meeting his expectations. "Well, this will certainly be news. Is he some kind of ambassador?"  
  
Vasiliy was following Emil around as he demonstrated various things in the workshop, seeming unfazed by some items but absolutely fascinated by others. Now, he and Emil had their heads together over a half-disassembled engine, Vasiliy following Emil's hand movements as he pointed out various features. Onni replied to Antti. "I think he's a scout, actually. He came with us as a forest guide rather than as a diplomat."  
  
Antti looked a little amused at the idea of the scouts he knew being put in this position. "Well, he seems curious enough. I'm sure learning something new will suit him fine."


	39. Chapter 39

Vasya hadn't known exactly whether Jaana meant that the "two days" he had to wait included the day he arrived, but she had seemed sincere in promising this "Danishman". Certainly, he could think of no real reason for her to proactively tell him such a specific lie. It was becoming very frustrating not being able to join in on any of the many, many conversations that were going on around him, so he was awaiting this newcomer eagerly.  
  
Something was clearly wrong when they went to visit this Virpi in her office. Vasya had not seen Emil become angry at all before, much less exude the kind of anger that filled the air with no need for translation. He hadn't needed to understand a word of what they were saying to see that Lalli was being talked down from a bad time after they left the office. This woman seemed perhaps like one to watch out for. It bothered Vasya that he couldn't know yet exactly what power she had over his new companions.  
  
At least the workshop they'd visited had been extremely interesting, and exactly the kind of thing he'd been thinking about seeing when he travelled to a new land. Some of the things they had were familiar, but others were powered in ways that didn't make sense to him, or were much larger than anything they used around the lakes. All of it had gone on the huge mental list of questions Vasya had for when the Danishman got here.  
  
The night before translation was hopefully going to arrive, he was shown that he had his own room now by Jaana, the lovely woman who had clearly been working hard to learn some Russian. It was well built and had a stove. The fire he started up in the evening was never going to produce as full a heat as the perpetually warmed kitchen they'd put him in the night before, but it was nice enough. He supposed it would be annoying having someone in the middle of the kitchen floor for too long.  
  
In the morning, he'd been quite bored. There wasn't much to do in this room, and now there wasn't even a room full of people to observe. He still wondered about the gathering he'd seen yesterday morning. The child kicking her feet in Emil's lap seemed likely to be his younger relative in some way. Vasya couldn't work out if she was Emil's own child, or a younger cousin or sibling. She looked a little more like Onni and Lalli than she did Emil, so perhaps a cousin.  
  
Finally, someone knocked on the door. It was Jaana again, with three people behind her. One was Virpi again, and two of them were people Vasya had not yet met. All hung back while Jaana beckoned him out and spoke in her strange, halting accent. "The Danishman came!"  
  
Vasya did indeed see a tall man, standing at ease with a nervous-looking girl beside him. The man was broad and blond, his moustache neat and his jacket equally so, but looking slightly under-padded for the weather. The girl beside him was tall too, gangly and red-haired, with a face so heavily freckled it almost looked like one big continuous mark across her cheeks and nose. Vasya extended his hand. "I'm very glad to see you."  
  
"He doesn't speak Russian." The girl stumbled over her words, speaking very quickly, then gasped and shut her mouth again. She also spoke strangely, but unlike with Jaana the distortion was nowhere near thick enough to obscure her meaning. Vasya was taken aback.  
  
"I was told there would be a Danishman coming to speak with me." Vasya hoped she would understand.  
  
The girl looked confused for a moment, then her face lit up with the recognition of something. She turned to Jaana and asked her something, speaking quickly. Jaana smacked herself in the face, dragging her palm down it, then replied to the girl.  
  
"She says she didn't remember that there were male and female forms for everything." The girl smiled. "Finnish apparently doesn't have such things! Isn't that most fascinating? She does know Icelandic too, though, so she feels very silly for not thinking of it."  
  
"Um." Vasya was very lost. "Say that again?" Icelandic sounded like yet another language, but not one he'd ever heard of.  
  
"Oh! I'm sorry, my accent is just frightful, please have patience!" She looked very awkward. "I just meant that when you heard "Danishman", that was because of a translation error! It is I who came to talk to you." Her nervousness, obscured for a moment by excitement, was coming back. "Is that quite alright?"  
  
Vasya didn't know how to answer that. It wasn't like they had a choice. Her Russian was perfectly understandable, although the way she phrased things was bizarrely archaic. Perhaps that was a personal quirk. She seemed a little strange to begin with, clutching a bag tightly to herself and seeming to stop breathing for a moment every time Vasya spoke. "Yes, it's alright. I'm just surprised." She nodded with wide eyes, clearly trying to project understanding, then gasped.  
  
"Oh, I'm sorry! I haven't introduced myself. My name is Tine. Tine Thomsen. And yourself?" She offered a hand as she said this. Vasya took it.  
  
"Vasiliy. Ah, Vasiliy... Yurevich Sokolov." He couldn't remember ever having been in a situation where he'd have to give his name like this before, and it felt quite odd, but she'd seemingly offered her full name so perhaps it was what one did.  
  
" _Yurevich_. And you're an explorer yourself. How _fitting_." Tine started the confusing ramble seemingly just to herself, looking a little distant, then switched her focus back to Vasya. "Oh, I don't know what to talk about first. There's so many things." She placed her lanky hands on the sides of her face, again looking like she might stop breathing for a moment.  
  
"It's good just to talk." Both good and strange. Breaking three weeks of silence was a bizarre feeling.  
  
Tine gasped again. She seemed prone to this. "Oh, I did intend to ask, have you been without anyone to talk to for this whole time...? Oh, you poor soul!" Vasya was a little uncomfortable with this being her immediate response, but it wasn't at all an unkind reaction, so he just shifted where he stood and tried to think of what to say next. Despite the long store of questions in his head, he couldn't at all work out where to start with them.  
  
Thankfully, Virpi said something of reasonable length, which seemed to give Tine an idea of what they should be talking about after all. "So, er, apparently we are meant to take you to breakfast and then we can start with some questions." Breakfast certainly sounded good. Jaana didn't accompany them there, Tine explaining she had her own work. The walk over was to a part of this village Vasya hadn't seen before, and they passed a building from which came the unmistakable smell of distillation. Being able to just take the chance to comment on things after being so quiet was irresistible, and Tine responded with all her awkward eagerness to Vasya's banal observations about it smelling like a party.  
  
Their breakfast turned out to be in a large, fairly drafty building. While a fire burned, it didn't produce much cosiness. The tables were long, though, and there were several items on offer for breakfast. They had put a lot of dried blueberries into the pancakes, and brought out both butter and honey. It was clearly intended to be especially nice, and Vasya soon learned why. Tine translated for Virpi as she relayed to him, over her own plate, that she was in charge around here and needed to know what exactly he represented from his own side. Was he a diplomat?  
  
"I'm a surveyor." Tine apparently needed more information than that. "I check the forest."  
  
Virpi nodded with an "ah" as Tine translated this to her, then the questions resumed. Why he was here, what his intentions were, what his impression was of Finland. Vasya told her, or rather Tine, the truth. He had meant to follow Lalli, Emil and Onni only a little further than the end of his own lands, and had been very surprised at how close Finland was. He had no specific intention besides his own curiosity, and had no real complaints besides the fact that he would really like to go home at some point. Virpi hummed thoughtfully at this explanation.  
  
"She wants to know how many of you there are." Tine was taking a fifth pancake with a slight air of not knowing if she was allowed to. Nobody was stopping her piling them up with as many condiments as she could, and she was slowly getting more bold about how much she took.  
  
"In all of Russia? I have no idea."  
  
"What about where you are from, specifically?" Vasya noticed that Virpi was holding up a map she'd produced from her own bag, smoothing it out. There was the outline of Ladoga, with no settlements marked on it. Virpi handed him a pencil and gestured, Tine explaining. "She wants you to draw where you live."  
  
Vasya did his best to outline it, giving population estimates for the islands on Tine's request. She took the pencil from his hand once he was done, writing something underneath the names he'd marked things with in their script. "I'm just transcribing the names. They can't read Cyrillic." Vasya looked at the equivalents she'd invented, still puzzled by the writing they used here. He realised she could answer one of the questions he'd had for two weeks now.  
  
"Do you all write like this, here?"  
  
Tine paused. "There are a few unique letters depending on the language, but we all use this general script, yes."  
  
This brought up another question. "How many languages do you people speak?"  
  
"There are five in the Known World. Well, now there are six, I suppose, because we found you!" She smiled. Virpi interjected with something. "Oh, sorry, I'm supposed to just be translating."  
  
"Can I ask her about the languages?"  
  
"She says yes. She says I can explain all the nations we have, actually."  
  
Vasya learned quite a lot over the next hour. Apparently, west of Russia there were multiple small nations, all with their own language. While Icelandic was used by many, it didn't have anything like the status Russian had in the world he knew. The patchwork nature of it sounded exhausting, but Tine seemed unfazed by it. The system she described, of Finns and Danes communicating in Icelandic as a mutual second language, at least seemed to be working well for them.  
  
Virpi noticed that the time had stretched out for quite a while. Vasya was excused until further notice, with the promise that he would be helped home eventually once they'd learned a few more things. There was no specific time limit given to this, but Vasya had the strong sense that Tine was not exactly a wily deciever, and she was already going on very enthusiastically about what information he might want to take home. She and her companion, who Vasya had finally learned was named Oscar, walked back with him towards his room. On the way, he passed someone familiar and waved him down.  
  
"Emil!" Now that Vasya had caught Emil's attention, he didn't know what he was going to do with it, but at least now he had a translator.  
  
"Can you tell him I say hello, and thank him for helping me over that wall?" Tine attempted to do so, but was met with just a shrug and a short phrase.  
  
"Oh, he doesn't speak Icelandic." There it was, the multi-language issue. Oscar made a comment to her, at which Emil's face flashed with recognition. Suddenly, he started speaking to them both. Tine replied with a tone of surprise, leaving Vasiliy very confused. She rushed to clarify the situation. "So, he's Swedish, which means we can speak together. With Swedish and Danish, you can come to an understanding speaking your own language at each other." Vasya noted this with confusion, wondering what this meant for his theory about how Emil fit in with the other two he'd first met. Emil communicated back that it had been no problem, and that he was glad Vasya had someone to talk to now.  
  
"Am I right in thinking Lalli was another you traveled with? Well, Emil says Lalli felt just awful for you when you were in quarantine. I'm told he knows what it's like to have nobody understand you for weeks on end." Tine was still translating. Vasya nodded. "And that's why he gave you some wood to carve, because he really was unsure what else might stop it being so awfully dull, and he really wanted to assist in some way." Well, Lalli was indeed kinder than his face revealed, then.  
  
"It helped. Thank you." Emil smiled when that was translated for him, and Tine said he wanted to know if Vasya had time to talk now they could. Once again, Vasya ended up in the house where Jaana lived, sitting in the kitchen. The oldest woman who lived in that house was there, Siv, and he finally learned that this was Emil's aunt. She made tea, which Vasya appreciated. He had perhaps been lying when he said he had no real complaints about Finland. As a nation, they seemed perfectly sensible about food so far, but didn't drink anywhere near enough tea.  
  
The conversation was strange at first. It felt honestly bizarre to move right from weeks of communicating in gestures into having clear, fast translation. Emil claimed this actually wasn't the first time he'd very quickly gone from silently traveling with someone to being able to converse with them, but declined to explain what he meant exactly, which was odd. Other information flowed freely, though. Vasya's assumption that Emil and Lalli were relatives turned out to be very far off the mark, Emil explaining the actual nature of their relationship very casually. "He says Onni and Lalli are cousins, however" clarified Tine, and the conversation moved on without Siv or either Dane seeming to react at all to anything Emil had said. Vasya followed their lead and kept drinking his tea.  
  
Tine, Siv and Emil were all fascinated by the mundane details Vasya shared about Russia. It began to feel actually companionable, telling these people about things like the way they were working on purging land outwards from Mantiansaari, how the big island Valaam had been a sanctuary since the very earliest days, how soon the butter week would be happening in a flurry of pancakes and snowballs. They had never heard of butter week. Vasya hoped he would be back for it, and was a little disappointed when all present told him not to hope too hard. Some council would be interested in meeting him, first, and he might have messages to bring back. Apparently the questioning today was just the start.  
  
At least everyone seemed sure nobody would truly keep him here against his will. Vasya thought of the bag of herbs he'd been given, and the vague warning that he might be travelling back in the real cold. Perhaps this had been a vision as well as a gift. At least it meant he should be back before spring.


	40. Chapter 40

After Virpi's questioning, Lalli had gone back to his room and crawled under his bed, despite it being far too cold to sleep there. He'd bit into his knuckle and let out a long, quiet wail of frustration that turned slightly into a sob at the end. Nothing was ever good enough. This thought occupied him for most of the afternoon. It made Lalli wish he already had normal work again, which would at least have been a good distraction. The moment it had reached a time that could surely be called evening, he heard a knock on the door and Emil's voice asking if it was still okay to come in.  
  
"Oh, wow, you must have been in the dark for hours." Emil found Lalli's lamp and lit it. "Have you been sitting here this whole time in the cold as well? It's freezing in here."  
  
"Sorry." Lalli's voice was dull as he moved to return from answering the door to curling up into a ball.  
  
"What, I - no, that's not what I meant! Lalli, I'm worried about you." Lalli wasn't sure what he actually thought Emil had meant in the first place, and hearing he was worried didn't actually help. If anything, it made Lalli feel worse, knowing he might have to talk about this and deal with someone feeling bad on account of him.  
  
"Don't worry." Lalli was sliding himself under his bed again. It was far too cold to sleep there, but it wasn't time to sleep yet, so he saw no reason to come out for longer than was necessary.  
  
Emil just lowered himself to the floor next to Lalli's bed, lying there facing him. It looked a little ridiculous from Lalli's perspective, peering out at Emil from his dusty hideaway. "She wasn't being fair on you."  
  
"I did it all wrong." Lalli thought about turning over to block Emil off, but didn't.  
  
"Lalli, you were amazing. You brought all of us home. We'd have died of starvation without you, probably."  
  
"You wouldn't have been out there in the first place without me."  
  
"I saw those tunnels too. I'm not surprised that happened to you." Emil huffed. "I can't believe Virpi treated you like that. As if it's your fault."  
  
"It is."  
  
"It isn't! I want to fight her for making you think that."  
  
"You'd lose."  
  
"I don't know, would I? I'm taller than her. Slightly. And I think I spend a lot more time carrying stuff than she does." Lalli had meant that Emil would never get away with trying to go against Virpi in any sense people normally might. Emil looking thoughtful, propping himself up on his elbow and starting to speculate about their respective battle capacities caught Lalli off-guard.  
  
"Well, she's probably sneakier than you." Lalli's voice was still dull as he answered.  
  
"I can be sneaky." Emil seemed miffed at Lalli's implication otherwise.  
  
Despite everything, Lalli had to answer that with a hint of amusement. "No, you can't." The question that came after was quite genuine. "Have you ever actually fought a person?" While people certainly acted unpredictably sometimes, Lalli was incredibly sure he was right when he thought Emil would never beat someone in anger. Violence came even less naturally to him than sneakiness did.  
  
"Well, okay, I haven't. But I bet she's some kind of evil creature anyway, and we've fought plenty of things like that." Emil looked up as he thought some more. "I wonder where her extra heads are." When Lalli's eyebrows rose in response, Emil took his hand off his chin and lay flush with the floor again, palms flat and the side of his hat meeting the ground. "They must be somewhere usually kept hidden. That's a worrying idea." Emil's voice kept a very serious tone and his eyes widened as he spoke. Lalli snorted just a little, partly at the mental image Emil was conjuring up, partly at the expression of horror Emil was putting on. His hands relaxed from where they'd been balled up near his chest.  
  
Emil's hand crept forward and took one of Lalli's. Their fingers laced together, tentatively. Lalli still felt very bleak about the day he'd had. As the conversation trailed off, the afternoon's mood threatened to come crashing back in with a vengeance. Emil kept lying where he was, his thumb rubbing against Lalli's hand. Lalli let it stay like that, and Emil started telling him about the day he'd had with Onni and Vasiliy. It was distracting enough.  
  
Eventually, Lalli admitted it was really cold down there and got out from under the bed. When he'd left this bed this morning he'd been really looking forward to coming back to it, hoping for a repeat of the previous night, but now he couldn't think of anything he wanted less than that. Emil didn't try to do anything but hold him very tightly. It was comforting in much the same way the confined space under Lalli's bed was. Despite all the things that had upset him still being true, by the time Lalli fell asleep he didn't feel quite as bad.  
  
Things were still pretty horrible the next day, though. Lalli was told he'd eventually have to talk to more people, this time with a translator, and Onni apparently wasn't an acceptable choice. There were people coming all the way from Iceland, and they'd want to get a very clear version of the answers when they asked Lalli at least as many questions as Virpi had. At least that wouldn't be for a few days, and Lalli tried to get his work schedule back on track. The sooner things returned to normal, the better.  
  
Emil's plans to see his aunt the next day had apparently been derailed when he met newcomers in Keuruu, and he told Lalli all about the Danish girl who had come to save them from the language issue. "Her name's Tine, apparently she's the only Russian speaker that anyone could find anywhere in the Known World, but she's 17, like, what the hell was I doing when I was 17? Anyway she's really nice, and she told me Vasiliy did like it when we tried to make quarantine less horrible for him, so that's good." Lalli did meet this Tine, but had no common language with her. All he got from their first encounter was that she was quite tall and seemed to be aware of who Lalli was.  
  
When the Icelandic group arrived, they wore very neat clothes and asked a lot of questions, translated to Lalli via some middle-aged woman he was sure he didn't know. Once again, recording devices were involved. One man showed Lalli pictures of various symbols, asking if he'd seen them when searching for the origin of the signal. Thankfully, those were yes or no questions, and didn't touch too badly on any fuzzy parts of Lalli's memory. He was asked to speak up more clearly several times, and eventually one Icelander resorted to just putting the device right up against Lalli's face whenever he spoke. It was unpleasant.  
  
The questioning took a long time, but the translator did notice when Lalli's answers got shorter and shorter. They promised him they wouldn't ask questions for so long again. It turned out to be the truth on their part, but not on the part of the other people who were now turning up in Keuruu and who wanted to take photos as well. Thankfully, most of them wanted to speak to Vasiliy, which meant relaying questions to Tine and noting her answers. According to Emil, she was just as keen to talk about this as any of the people from the newspapers, which was good for her, at least.  
  
Lalli found Vasiliy hiding behind a building on his way to work one day, and just nodded in understanding when he saw him press a finger to his lips. Hiding from all the people who wanted to know every detail definitely made sense. Someone had finally bothered to tell Lalli that Vasiliy wanted to go home before Feburary ended, and that all were agreed that letting him go as soon as he insisted was the only diplomatic option. Lalli didn't know why everyone was so keen to keep hold of him in the first place. They knew where his village was now. The Icelanders had loved the map they'd been shown.  
  
The task of avoiding people who wanted to take a picture of him was incredibly annoying. These were the ones who worked for newspapers, people with grabby hands and priorities in which quotes they scribbled down that felt very odd. Onni and Emil were similarly avoidant, both for different reasons. Onni, like Lalli, was doing his best just to get back to his normal life. Emil was still quite upset at what had happened to his face while fighting trolls, claiming this was the worst possible time for so many pictures of him to be produced. Lalli thought he looked fine, and told him so. It was barely worth paying attention to, as scars went.  
  
Besides, even if it had been something that really changed how Emil looked, it wasn't as if that would have mattered to Lalli personally. Emil being beautiful was very appreciated - he thought about how attractive he was enough for it to be really distracting sometimes - but it had stopped factoring into Lalli's decisions about him quite a long time ago. Emil's company spoke for itself. When Lalli voiced these sentiments, mentally cursing his inability to ever do his feelings justice, Emil was so quiet for a moment that Lalli was sure he'd said something wrong. Once the words left his mouth and were met with silence, it seemed like such an obvious overstep to share how he felt about it, when the face Emil was upset about was his own.  
  
"No, that was really sweet of you, actually. You know, it's the same from me. All of that." Emil was still stood there by Lalli's door with his boots half off, as he'd been when Lalli had started talking.  
  
"Oh." Lalli had thought those things before, but it hadn't occurred to him to say them until now. If he'd known that Emil would respond in turn, and then with such happy, lengthy kissing, he'd have done so sooner. While most of Keuruu was now saturated with the chance for stressful encounters, nobody had told the new people where exactly Lalli lived, one small blessing he clung to at times like this. Being back on nights made the fact of Emil sharing his room all the time a slight inconvenience, but the arrangement had its moments.  
  
It ended when Emil's aunt finally went home, after finding a few clear afternoons to really catch up with her nephew. She apparently claimed to have really enjoyed the chance to get to know Lalli better, and to meet so many people Emil knew. The end of Feburary was approaching, and Lalli could see the return of routine on the horizon. Onni mirroring his own grump about this stretching on was something Lalli appreciated. At least he wasn't the only one who hated every minute of the prodding and accolades for their "discovery".  
  
Before Vasiliy left, Virpi found Lalli and told him he would be coming with her and standing still for at least one important photo. Lalli followed in a vile mood, arriving to find Emil, Onni and Vasiliy also standing around awkwardly waiting. Emil was playing with his fringe, flopping it over the "bad" side of his face, which looked ridiculous. Lalli fixed everything back where it should be for him, and Emil let it stay that way. Emil reciprocated the effort by waiting until Virpi was deep in conversation with someone then whispering to Lalli that he'd decided the extra head was the one they could see now, and her normal head was permanently stuffed up her arse. Lalli did smirk at that.  
  
"Can you all just get in a row already?" Virpi was done talking. The four of them obliged, Tine still ever-present and chattering away at Vasiliy. She was taking the chance herself to arrange him a bit, seeming quite excited about everything that was going on still.    
  
The person behind the camera hadn't known what to demand people say to make them smile, but they'd taken a photo all together, the four that had arrived over the eastern fence. Lalli suspected this would be the last time he'd see Vasiliy, and presumed he was meant to do something about this. Mirroring the way people greeted each other was probably good enough. When Vasiliy shook Lalli's hand, he managed to say something in Finnish, and it was indeed a goodbye. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only two more chapters to go in this, I think! Don't expect any updates till Sunday, though, I have to entertain a friend tomorrow night and Stam1na are in town on Saturday so that'll be another evening occupied. If I don't end up too hungover, maybe I can finish all of this on Sunday, but I cannot make any promises there.


	41. Chapter 41

Things getting back to normal was taking a long time. Emil hadn't known to expect this. A lot of people had asked him recently if he'd ever guessed something like this would happen within his lifetime, and he had honestly answered no. Merja laughed at him when he mentioned this during their first real conversation after his return. "I remember when the world was as small as my own family's island and a few others. You have no idea how fast the world got bigger when I was your age." Emil supposed it must be true. To him, the Known World was a more or less static entity, but had he been only a generation older he might never have thought that way.   
  
It was a strange thing to become aware of, his own place in a timeline and the vast difference in their perspectives. Of course, he was aware Merja often saw the world very differently to him, but this was the first time he'd properly dwelled on how much the world had changed in her lifetime. For the first time in his life, he seriously wondered if the world he died in would be at all similar to the one he'd been born into. His own actions, it seemed, had made the answer to that a very probable "no". It was surreal, and equally surreal to feel vaguely self-aware about what was happening to his own worldview. Surely, his perspective widening must mean he'd grown up a bit. That appraisal was new and very strange.   
  
There wasn't much time to dwell on such existential questions, though, as the factual ones just kept coming. Emil tried to take on any questioning that could have gone to either him or Lalli. It was surely easier for him to cope with someone shoving a microphone in his face. It seemed that Onni, despite being fairly restrained himself, had come to the same conclusion. Emil found him on more than one occasion, standing between Lalli and some person with a notepad or recording device, insisting with placid-seeming stubbornness that one Hotakainen would be just as good as another for what they needed. Emil felt bad for Vasiliy, constantly harangued by people's desire to hear the Russian language even if they couldn't understand a word. When Tine started to seem concerned about the man who had essentially become her job, Emil did his best to surreptitiously point her to parts of Keuruu where one might hide more easily.   
  
It was incredibly annoying, even if Emil didn't find it as hard as Lalli and Onni did. There was just so much to do now that he was back, and this turned out to be a huge distraction from what he really wanted to be doing. There would be some work in the summer keeping the barrier zone on the edge of the cleansed land, and Antti was already drawing up plans that would involve Emil and everyone else who knew their way around a flamethrower. The workshop, too, was as busy as ever. On top of this, Emil wanted very badly to make a priority of seeing Viivi and Janne as much as possible, terrified of somehow making their new anxiety about him even worse. Increasingly often, Merja found him in the mornings sleeping by Janne and Viivi's bed, not having the heart to insist Viivi let him leave the night before. He really wasn't supposed to be doing this, but everything was so chaotic Merja let it pass. "Just for now."  
  
When Emil finally got the chance to speak to his aunt properly, it was kind of bizarre. Here she was, exactly as she'd always been, but in a place where Emil himself had changed so much and carved out a niche for himself. He hadn't expected it to feel this strange just having a conversation with her, as if different parts of himself were being layered on each other in a way that clashed. There were a few things that were particularly odd to discuss. He always somewhat censored his discussion of life in Keuruu in his letters, eliding mentions of the daily magic, but it was harder to do that in real time. In the end, Siv brought the topic up herself, sitting in the kitchen with him and seemingly addressing her teacup as she asked "So, did you really get a message from Sanna?"  
  
Emil thought about his answer. "Onni did."  
  
"I just can't work out how your group would have known so clearly the time people here expected the message to be sent, unless you really did receive it. And you had no radio contact at all? Nobody in Saimaa telling you what people here said?"  
  
"Nothing like that, no." Emil still wasn't sure what exactly Siv's reaction was going to be to anything he said here.   
  
"So they spoke in their dreams, communicating by magic." Siv was still staring at her tea, the word "magic" falling out of her mouth with deep awkwardness.   
  
Emil just shrugged. "Um, well. Seems so to me." At one point in his life he might have turned this into a crowing I-told-you-so, getting one over on his know-it-all aunt. The way she asked him, though, felt more like she was approaching an equal than any of her interactions with him before. He should act in a way that lived up to it.   
  
Siv leaned back and sighed. "Well, that's certainly very interesting. So... Jaana only speaking to mages about that baby she's having. Is that sensible, around here?"  
  
"Um, I mean, I know nothing about that specifically, but I know Onni stops people bleeding. Just by singing. So, I guess probably."  
  
Siv raised her eyebrows. "Is that meant to be common? As an ah, ability?"  
  
"I'm not sure. Onni is really unusually good at what he does, you know. People here respect his magic." Emil wasn't sure if this was pushing it, but given the slightly pitying way he'd heard Siv refer to Onni's "folk beliefs" before, wanted to put the opinion across. He wasn't going to mention his first life-altering memory of Onni's magic again, the unforgettable sight of fire turning into a bird before his eyes and proceeding to fly around speaking Finnish. The surprising long-distance communication seemed to be enough to do it for Siv.  
  
Siv looked thoughtful and sipped her tea. "Hmm. I never knew."  
  
The topic didn't come up again before she left, finally giving Emil his room back. Emil told her to give his love and regards to everyone back in Mora. Their last conversation before she got on the boat was a discussion of which Swedish food Emil missed in Finland, Siv promising that if she returned it would be with a supply of one specific kind of pickled herring.   
  
Eventually, Vasiliy left too, not before Virpi could corral them all into a photo together. Emil wondered if Vasiliy would be alright, heading home through the deep freeze that sat on the land through late Feburary and early March. Tine struggled to translate the answer to Emil's concerns, but claimed "Vasya" had some charm that would keep away hypothermia. She didn't sound greatly reassured by it, but Emil guessed this was her own discomfort with magic rather than Vasiliy being genuinely unprepared. It seemed very likely the Russian mages knew a thing or two about the cold.   
  
After that departure, many of the people milling around Keuruu did leave. Tine seemed upset by this exciting phase of her life ending, especially so by the fact of having to say goodbye to Vasiliy. Before she herself departed towards the new work the Nordic Council was preparing for her, she told Emil that she was very hopeful that "her dear friend Vasya" would return and that she would meet everyone from here again. Emil wasn't sure if that would ever happen, but did take it when she went in for a hug on their last meeting. It was likely she would have far more exciting places than Keuruu to visit now that she was essential to running the world, but he did hope she'd get that wish someday. She was sweet.   
  
Finally, Lalli was getting some quiet, and life could vaguely start to be organised in the way it had been before. There were still so many things going on, but at least he could start to greet Lalli in the way he normally did without risking some weird person noting down how they acted together. Usually, Emil didn't want to hide how much he loved Lalli from anyone, but the specific nosiness of the people from newspapers felt like a kind of indignity he shouldn't get used to. He knew Lalli would have hated there being yet another dimension to people's questioning of the impetus behind their journey, if only because it would have meant more of the questions. It was likely, even given Emil's restraint, that anyone with eyes could have worked out why he had been so ready to run across the world for this specific person. Their peace was a precious resource now, though, and they were keeping as much of it as they could.   
  
Moving back in with his usual housemates was a relief. They were routine and reasonableness, although as time went on Emil started to really feel the fact that sometime soon, their lives would all change. As they moved past February, Jaana was becoming more obviously pregnant, and less restrained about sending anyone with free time on oddly timed missions to fetch her food. What she wanted wasn't always there, and Emil got used to the humouring looks the food store people gave him when he turned up right before their hours ended with a weirdly specific request. They knew what the situation was, as did most people now. When Emil came home one day to find Jaana dabbing at her face in the kitchen, he assumed it was another one of the overwhelming moods she seemed to be having a lot of.  
  
"No, I don't need anything, I just went to have a talk with Onni about something, it was, well. Don't worry."  
  
Emil had been surprised that Onni would make her cry like that. "Wait, did you have a fight? What about?"  
  
"No." Jaana did actually smile through how weepy she was. Although weak, it seemed fairly genuine. "We just had a big talk." Her voice definitely still had some cracks in it. "A good talk. Really." Emil couldn't at all work out what it could be about, but it seemed best to leave it. He was sure she was already talking to a different mage about everything to do with her baby, an older woman Emil really didn't know at all, so it must be something between them he hadn't been aware of. He ran into Onni very shortly afterwards and so nearly brought it up. Onni ended up being the one to do so, asking if Jaana had been alright as they broke off conversation, in a tone so carefully casual it had to be hiding something.  
  
"She said you and her had a good talk. I don't need to know." Of course, Emil wanted to know, but this seemed like it might be territory even he would fear to tread on.   
  
Onni just nodded, blinking. "We did, yes. I'll see you around."  
  
Viivi's forgiveness for Emil abandoning them was coming so much faster than Janne's. Emil could have guessed it would be this way, and tried not to take it too hard when Janne's distrust expressed itself. He just turned up as soon as he could in the evenings, trying his best to finish the story for the two of them that he'd promised to. The tone of it remained fairly melancholy compared to the previous books in the series, but Viivi listened with the same rapt face she always had, and Emil felt like maybe it was something he himself could do with reading right now. The story of people changing through a lonely winter together brought on some kind of reflection, a means of starting to process his own strange couple of months. When the final sheet was turned over and he declared they'd reached the end, it somehow felt like the germs of some conclusions for him, too. 


	42. Chapter 42

"I just can't believe it." Sigrun was waving her cup around, spilling a little of the tea inside on the floor of the cafe. "That he went on a journey like that. Six weeks of adventure and battle. Honour and glory upon return." She took a swig from her cup that Mikkel was surprised didn't scald her. "And he didn't _fucking_ bring me!" She slumped back in her chair, the cup hanging carelessly from her hand now thankfully empty.  
  
The people on the surrounding tables were staring a little. Mikkel put his own teacup down, placing it delicately in its saucer. "From what I understand, it was a rather impromptu mission."  
  
"They found an underground city and battled the monsters inside it!" Sigrun had a distant look on her face that said she was picturing herself at war with the dragons inside such a place, pained by the image's lack of reality.  
  
"I believe it was a train network."  
  
"Oh, oh, and you know what the worst part is." Sigrun switched topics without acknowledging the correction at all. "He doesn't even _care_. All his letters to me are about how he's trying to teach his kids to read -"  
  
"Excuse me?" Mikkel had clearly missed something.  
  
"- no, not like, _his_ his, but _basically_ \- anyway, he's gone and survived something even I wouldn't try to do, and saved his little Finnish princess there from the maws of death, and won any honour he'd care to take, but he _won't_ take it. Because he's _busy_."  
  
Mikkel had heard several versions of the story that had been echoing around the Known World for two months now. The variety of people that had swooped in to take recordings of events leading up to the new contact meant that even Emil's own version had taken multiple forms. When they played the Swedish recording some Mora journalist had taken on the Bornholm radio, it was just "a strange feeling" that led them out into the wilderness. When one of the Finnish recordings - Mikkel had taken a moment to place Emil's voice, but it was surely him speaking - had been played on an international channel with a crisp Icelandic voiceover, the phrasing used had been in the same terms Icelanders used to discuss mages' visions. It seemed unlikely that either was quite right.  
  
"Just, where did the spark go? _What happened?_ " Sigrun was still ranting.  
  
"I imagine it went to the same place a lot of people's thirst for glory goes, once they find some meaning in their lives." Mikkel's reply was mild and ended in another sip of his tea.  
  
" _Ugh_. Well, there's another one I won't be seeing in Valhalla. Pity for him. Unless Twigs goes and gets himself into trouble again, I suppose." Sigrun's concern for exactly how much mead Emil would get in the afterlife was very touching, but Mikkel couldn't help but think this bit of character development was probably a good thing.  
  
It wasn't as if the "sparky" Emil they'd known was totally gone, anyway. Among the many recordings that had been broadcast all over the radio channels the moment said channels could get hold of them, there had been an account from that older Hotakainen, Onni, being interviewed in his thickly Finnic Icelandic. The question of "So you say you went virtually unarmed?" by the gobsmacked native-sounding Icelandic interviewer was met with a coolly neutral account of Emil improvising a stash of Molotov cocktails and taking down giants with them. Mikkel had felt rather proud of him, as well as slightly amused at his continued dedication to solving problems with fire.  
  
Mikkel decided to try to change the topic slightly. "So, I hear the Russians sent an envoy back, after their scout returned with information about us."  
  
"Oh yeah. I heard that too." Sigrun looked down and realised she'd already finished her cake. "Hmm, I'm kind of feeling a second slice of this."  
  
"Not so interested in the details of this new nation, then."  
  
"I guess. I don't know what it means, really." Sigrun decided to take a forkful of Mikkel's cake instead of buying herself a whole new slice. "Hey, you like reading and overthinking stuff. What does it mean? For, you know, normal stuff. That there's another country."  
  
"Depends how much of it there is, I suppose. We've only spoken to the Ladoga settlements, but people there say there's more to the east. Skalds might have to learn some Russian now. And if they want to join the Dagrenning programme, once they've solved the logistical difficulties of integrating Finns that would probably lay a lot of the groundwork to put Russians next in the queue."  
  
"So, no normal stuff."  
  
"There might be different food someday."  
  
"Oh, now you're talking. Hopefully no mandarins. Did I ever tell you about those? They taste like a lemon that killed itself."  
  
Mikkel did remember Sigrun telling him this, all three previous times.  
  
"Hey, wasn't it a Dane that made us able to talk to them in the first place?" Sigrun threw that out looking quite pleased at having known it.  
  
"Indeed it was. I think everyone that knew her is quite surprised that this is how her life turned out." Mikkel had done a double take when he'd heard the radio play of the first Russian in the Known World being interviewed. He'd been away from anywhere with a broadcast-receiving radio when the news broke, but two weeks afterwards had sat by the first one he found and listened intently as breathless announcers rehashed it all again. A measured Russian monologue had turned out to be overdubbed with a quick young voice speaking lightly Danish-accented Icelandic. He would not have guessed that the strangely obsessive teenage girl that bothered everyone on Bornholm about their old-world war tat would ever become this internationally relevant.  
  
"Guess reading is good for something after all. Must be nice for her." Sigrun clearly did know a little more about the story than the bare details of people's nationalities. "I like her voice, she's got spirit."  
  
Mikkel made an affirmative noise. It was indeed a rather charming outcome, and Sigrun's last comment brought up a thought he'd had many times over the past few weeks. "Strange to think that voices we know are going to be played in history classes. They've made sure to record all they could."  
  
Sigrun looked uncharacteristically philosophical, her voice taking on the air of a rote-learned recitation. _"Cattle die, kinsmen die, you yourself die; one thing now that never dies, the fame of a dead man’s deeds."_ She grinned and crossed her arms once she'd said it, again clearly pleased to have the knowledge.  
  
"Unusually poetic for you, Sigrun."  
  
"Ancient Viking saying." She paused. "So I guess people will still be listening to that recording of Twigs in a hundred years. I mean, I can only understand the dub-over, but it's a great story." Putting on a poor impression of a whispery Finnish accent, Sigrun repeated a version of Lalli's now-famous account of making contact. " _'I already told you. I thought he was a troll'_. Picture opening a sauna door and finding that." She laughed at the mental image, clearly finding it hilarious.  
  
Mikkel had thought many times about what a huge relief it was that the contact standoff had never escalated beyond what it did, but had to admit that in the absence of serious consequences, the image was funny. "Speaking of pictures, have you seen the one of all of them that's been printed everywhere?"  
  
By way of an answer, Sigrun reached into her coat and produced a newspaper clipping, a sepia printing of the image that had come to lead nearly every report. Underneath the photograph, there was a caption describing its contents.  
  
_From left to right: Lalli Hotakainen (FI), 22. Emil Västerström (SE), 21. Vasiliy Sokolov (RUS), 20. Onni Hotakainen (FI), 29._  
  
To Mikkel, Lalli looked much like he always had, his hair slightly longer and more unkempt than usual from his months in the wilderness. He was looking off to the side, one hand gripping Emil's shoulder, his constant expression of being just slightly spooked by something still the same as Mikkel remembered. Emil had changed much more, wearing clothes that looked far more Finnish and the slash that had appeared on his face making him look a little older. He was leaning towards Lalli, his smile half in that direction rather than towards the camera. The Russian was adopting a similarly at-ease stance, his hat tucked under his arm and his light-looking hair sticking up at angles. The camera took in just enough of all their bodies to catch the top of his boots. Onni was making no attempt to smile, his arms crossed and his gaze at the camera direct.  
  
"Nice to have a picture of those two together. Bless 'em, couldn't you just puke." Sigrun was tapping between Emil and Lalli on the paper as she spoke.  
  
"Indeed." It caught them well. Sigrun continued finishing Mikkel's cake for him. It was probably time to go.  
  
As they headed out, Mikkel wondered how long it would have taken for contact to be made had this mad quest not been undertaken. Once the Nordic nations had found each other again, there had been little attempt to venture outwards and find more survivors. While it did seem that the initial mission was actually such an attempt, the pet project of some Finn, its success had effectively been a complete accident.  
  
Perhaps those history lessons would involve debates on exactly how much of this had been inevitable, and how much had been the sheer luck of a heart-eyed fool and a desperate family protector. Mikkel was no stranger to the feeling of witnessing history, but this time there was a pleasant excitement in not knowing at all how it would be told.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here it is! For anyone who ever wondered "how many bleeding chapters is this going to stretch to", the answer is as ever 42. Of course, there are two more sequels already being written. There are many threads that have been left hanging here, but now everyone's home safe I think it's best to have a break between works. I'm so wowed by anyone who's kept reading for this entire rambling journey, and hope there's still enough interest for people to want to read the next two. (Please, let me know if you do have any interest.)
> 
> I have been going back and editing a few things when the whim strikes, and will be doing some serious edits on the Moscow chapters of this fic eventually. Yesterday I added a scene to chapter 14 of an older fic (Kasvatus) which I think just gives a little closure on what exactly was going on in people's heads, the chapter is about twice as long now and the scene gets summed up in the chapter after as well. I will likely go back and edit that particular fic a few times, given that I wrote it a bit quickly. Probably nobody will ever see the edits, but if people are going over them again, I guess there will be a few novel bits.


End file.
